The 3rd "FMCG + Internet Conference" organized by New Distribution was grandly held on November 8-9, 2017 at the Chongqing Yuelai International Convention Center! It attracted thousands of industry distributors, manufacturers, and internet companies from all over the country, with a full house and unprecedented scale. The following is the speech delivered by Shi Zhengchuan, founder and chief product officer of Qianmi Network, at the conference, specially compiled by New Distribution for our readers.
Shi Zhengchuan: I am the best product manager in this venue. I served as CEO for over a decade and then upgraded to product manager. It's great. I am the one with the most years as CEO among product managers. I feel great coming up here, sharing after a crosstalk comedian. It's really interesting. I sat next to him without saying a word and realized how humorous he is.
There are many old friends here, and many new friends. Hello everyone! Let me clarify one thing: yesterday afternoon, a colleague sent me an article saying that a competitor had smeared us, hiring a ghostwriter to write negative articles and even sending them to our clients.
Qianmi is four years old. On October 31st, just a few days ago, we held our fourth anniversary launch event. At that event, we announced our channel policy, similar to what brand manufacturers do: find an exclusive agent, and the exclusive agent takes some stock. It was just a pre-announcement; we won't implement it until the end of November. We haven't done channels all these years because we thought that unless our product system is two or three streets ahead of competitors, we wouldn't be embarrassed to do channels. But after we announced the channel policy, a media article titled "Will Qianmi Be the Next Yidao?" came out. Last night, a guy from Yidao called me, saying, "You're in trouble; we're back on the headlines because of you." They said we adopted the channel policy because we ran out of money and were about to collapse. They saw online that we only had one Series A funding of 50 million yuan, back in 2014. Competitors wondered how we could burn through 50 million for so many years. Indeed, we didn't announce the subsequent two rounds. We felt that unless each round was over $50 million, we wouldn't tell the media. As a result, competitors guessed that after Series A, we were done. I want to use your social networks to speak out: in fact, our Series A+ and Series B amounts are several times that of our competitors! Thank you for patiently listening to this little story.
Today's theme: Empowering Distribution, Connecting You and Me. Qianmi makes software. From the very beginning, we set our mission: to make e-commerce easy. But essentially, we are a software company. I am personally proud; I never thought that empowering distributors with software is something to be ashamed of. I also never thought that building a platform where distributors supply goods, a centralized platform, is lofty or remarkable. That is Qianmi's positioning. Our CEO is also sitting in the audience; this is his view.
New brands, new distribution, new retail—these are what we constantly talk about internally. When Qianmi says "new," what do we mean? We use internet IT to empower traditional brand manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. That is our understanding of new internet IT. Internet IT is software running entirely in the cloud, because we believe that in the future, all new merchants will be nodes in the cloud, and we firmly believe that the future business society will be decentralized. Chu Zheng just spoke very well, saying that Alibaba essentially wants to build a centralized platform, turning everyone into sellers on it. I don't believe that at all. Retail Link and New Distribution Channels say they will eliminate all distributors and make everyone a merchant there. I really don't believe that. That is our cognition of the future.
As chief product officer, I should talk about products. Qianmi's products target distributors. We used to call our product "Cloud Ordering," but now, I clearly tell you, Qianmi is not about ordering. We firmly believe that ordering—the link between distributors and retailers—has never been the most painful point. Many guests have talked about many pain points, but no one ever mentioned a pain point called reporting goods. So, we think doing ordering is wrong. At noon today, I told Jiang Tao of Order Treasure, "Brother, you're doing the wrong thing; what you're doing has little hope." He said, "I also think there's little hope, but what can we do?" There are too many pain points. We are squeezed on both sides: we have to drink with brand manufacturers, and we have to play price games with retailers. Salespeople are hard to manage; once they have a few clients, they go independent. Customer payment terms are never clear, and your records never match the customer's records. So many pain points, so many messy things.
Therefore, Qianmi's software targets the distributor side. We hope to provide an integrated, no-information-silo, one-stop, full-suite cloud distribution solution that solves distributor pain points. Qianmi now focuses on every person in the enterprise. We empower every partner; partners care about real convenience and efficiency, so we care more about people. We care more about business. Business doesn't improve just because you have features and software. Of course, no company has gone bankrupt because of using software. If the software doesn't include many business strategies, including better building commercial and business connections with your customers and suppliers, making business easier, then the software is ineffective.
Empowering distribution, connecting you and me. When we provide software to distributors, we also provide a complete cloud solution to the distributor's customers. We have Cloud Procurement; Cloud Distribution and Cloud Procurement are a natural pair. Offline, there are various community stores and Cloud Mini Stores. We provide these complete solutions. We just hope that our customers and our customers' customers can simply connect in the cloud. All your customer data, inventory data, and product data can be shared with each other if you are willing.
Let me talk about Cloud Procurement separately. No one has thought about the pain points of procurement personnel. When every distributor has its own Cloud Distribution, have you thought about the customer's experience? Do they have to remember 50 or 100 accounts? Each person's information is not interconnected, and customers are overwhelmed. So, for procurement personnel, we provide a more complete multi-supplier software. We hope that distributors and retailers can establish stable and transparent transaction relationships in the cloud. That is Qianmi's pursuit. Stable and transparent transaction relationships—that is what Qianmi seeks between distributors and retailers, and it is decentralized. Qianmi does not provide a centralized traffic outlet, completely different from opening new channels. If I open a new channel today, isn't that just Taobao? There's no difference from Taobao; all sellers supply goods.
We also provide two products: Community Store and Cloud Mini Store. The informatization of community stores and cloud mini stores in China is as poor as that of distributors. The essence of retail is experience and efficiency. The most important thing in operations is the supply chain. However, our traditional IT, our traditional "pig teammates," have never truly put our retailers on cloud nodes. Today I saw one company finally starting to do cloud things, investing without regard to cost—that is Haiding. Qianmi is investing even more aggressively in this area. Because we believe that the future of Chinese retail must be based on cloud membership, chain operations, decentralization, and highly collaborative and connected cloud ecosystems. That is my very clear judgment about the future. Based on all this cognition, Qianmi is doing IT for cloud distribution and offline stores. For distribution, large distributors doing B2B can use our private cloud. In fact, many large B2B operators in China use Qianmi's private cloud solutions. I myself also operate several distribution enterprises, which are B2B companies. On one hand, I hope every traditional distributor becomes B2B, but on the other hand, I have never been very optimistic about B2B. Because we see that the essence of current B2B is cross-regional selling. Your relationship with brand manufacturers and retailers has always been very unstable. Brand manufacturers dislike you; retailers like you, but the relationship is purely price-based. So, I am also not very optimistic about many current B2B models, including New Distribution Channels and Huimin.
Channel O2O: On March 6, we will provide a top-down, end-to-end channel O2O solution for brand manufacturers' channel departments, from brand to distribution to retail. Centralized warehousing and distribution will be on April 3 next year. Our solution is cloud-based; different customers can collaborate in the cloud. Any distributor with spare warehousing and transportation capacity can instantly release that capacity to peers. Of course, those specializing in warehousing and transportation can also collaborate online with our existing distributors in a decentralized manner. On April 24, we will provide cloud solutions for professional wholesale market operators. Because wholesalers and distributors in every city often have close ties with local professional wholesale markets; you have stores there, even delivery services. So, we hope everyone can collaborate in the cloud.
In martial arts, speed is the key. The most important thing in software is iterating products to meet customer needs. All our software is role-based and people-oriented. After Double 11, we must iterate the features under each role every half month. That is my commitment to all Qianmi customers.
Thank you!
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