---
title: "The \"Cat and Dog\" Wine War Heats Up: Are Traditional Wine Merchants Facing a Life-or-Death Crisis?"
description: "The \"Cat and Dog\" battle between Tmall and JD.com over the wine business is intensifying, posing a potential existential threat to traditional wine distributors. As both e-commerce giants aggressively court major liquor brands and expand their reach, traditional channels must adapt or risk being left behind."
author: "云酒"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2018-01-23"
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# The "Cat and Dog" Wine War Heats Up: Are Traditional Wine Merchants Facing a Life-or-Death Crisis?

> The "Cat and Dog" battle between Tmall and JD.com over the wine business is intensifying, posing a potential existential threat to traditional wine distributors. As both e-commerce giants aggressively court major liquor brands and expand their reach, traditional channels must adapt or risk being left behind.

The "Cat and Dog" battle, are traditional wine merchants facing a life-or-death crisis?
_Source: Yunjiu Toutiao (ID: YJTT2016)_ ______
For the wine industry, August 30, 2016, was a memorable day. On that day, Tmall and JD.com seemed to have coordinated their announcements to enter the wine business: **Tmall announced the launch of the "9.9 Tmall Global Wine Festival"**, aiming to create an "online Silk Road" connecting global wine origins, allowing consumers to taste over 100,000 fine wines from 50 countries; **JD.com announced a partnership with Moutai, Wuliangye, Lafite, and other domestic and international wine brands to establish China's first "Authentic Wine Alliance"**, with the goal of creating 10 wine brands with annual sales of 1 billion yuan.
Now, over a year later, every move by Tmall and JD.com still attracts industry-wide attention.
In recent days, JD.com has launched exclusive products like Gujing's small bottle "Gujing Xiaoleizi" and Wuliangye's "Youjiu" brand, leveraging JD's powerful channel network and sales capabilities to turn them into stars in the wine industry.
Following that, Tmall launched its "City Exclusive Day" campaign, with posters like "The first cup of national liquor Moutai in the new year, to toast family reunion," "The first cup of Lang (wine) in the new year, to toast the striving self," "The first cup of Dong (wine) in the new year, to toast heritage," and "The first cup of Goose Island craft beer in the new year, to toast the next moment," engaging in a long-distance "battle."
While this has become the norm in the "Cat and Dog War" over the past year, it still fuels the industry's curiosity: Is the "Cat and Dog War" about to reignite?
**I. The 2017 "Land Grab"**
In fact, throughout 2017, JD.com and Tmall were in a constant race.
That year, famous liquor companies like Moutai, Wuliangye, Yanghe, Gujing, and Niulanshan all became JD.com's "guests":
On March 20, Gujing Gongjiu launched a platform-exclusive product, the "Gujing Gongjiu 37 Boju Series," exclusively on JD.com;
On June 15, Wuliangye Group Chairman Li Shuguang and JD.com Group Chairman and CEO Liu Qiangdong personally appeared together, announcing a comprehensive upgrade of their strategic cooperation;
On June 21, Liu Qiangdong and Yanghe Co., Ltd. Chairman Wang Yao signed a strategic cooperation agreement, declaring that Yanghe's full product line aims to achieve over 10 billion yuan in sales on JD.com within the next five years;
On August 31, JD.com and Niulanshan signed a strategic cooperation agreement setting a goal of selling over 600 million bottles within five years. On November 6, Niulanshan's "Beier Niu" small bottle was launched on JD.com. Beyond product planning, the cooperation also covers brand building, marketing planning, and especially precision marketing and technical cooperation.
Tmall, leveraging the "Tmall Global Wine Festival" platform, gained the favor of **Moutai, Changyu, and the world's five major foreign liquor groups: Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Rémy Cointreau, Moët Hennessy, and Beam Suntory** thanks to its excellent "understanding of consumers"; the Italian government allocated special funds to promote Italian wine culture on Tmall; Pernod Ricard and Moët Hennessy both "settled" on Tmall, with Pernod Ricard even embracing local customs by hosting live streams to interact with Tmall wine enthusiasts; Lafite launched a special customized edition on Tmall to "please" Chinese consumers; and the world-renowned Bordeaux wine exhibition Vinexpo signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tmall to help local wine merchants and châteaux enter the Chinese market.
At the same time, Tmall and JD.com, always at odds, clashed directly over Moutai. As early as August 2016, Moutai and Alibaba had already engaged in extensive and deep strategic cooperation in e-commerce, data technology, marketing promotion, financial services, and supply chain, focusing on product development, brand building, merchant empowerment, and supply chain optimization. The two sides agreed that Moutai Group would fully support and participate in Alibaba's "September 9 Tmall Global Wine Festival."
In October 2017, Liu Qiangdong led JD.com's FMCG general manager Feng Yi and wine department head Yang Ye, along with the team, to visit Moutai in full force, proposing the "JD First Moutai Culture Festival," which received Moutai's support. Reports even indicated that **Liu Qiangdong challenged Alibaba twice in 2017, vowing to "surpass Alibaba in 4 years" and "surpass Tmall in 5 years."**
**II. The "Cat and Dog Wine War": What Trump Cards Do They Hold?**
In fact, a careful examination of how JD.com and Tmall "embrace" liquor companies reveals: JD.com chooses "proactive service," providing comprehensive "thoughtful" services from product development, brand building, marketing planning, logistics and distribution, to big data analysis of consumers; Tmall, on the other hand, uses the "Global Wine Festival" to continuously enhance its "charm," making more companies that see its value proactively "come knocking."
In addition, **JD.com and Tmall's extreme channel sinking and "new retail" experience can be seen as a "showroom" for the wine industry.**
As early as 2014, JD.com began its "land grab" in third- to sixth-tier cities, first "building" basic logistics and distribution networks into cities, then establishing warehouses, delivery stations, and pickup points in each city, replicating the same-day and next-day delivery services available in first- and second-tier cities to third- to sixth-tier cities, significantly speeding up delivery.
In 2017, JD.com extended its existing business lines to rural areas. Liu Qiangdong even made bold claims: **JD.com will open 1 million JD convenience stores nationwide, half of them in rural areas, covering every village in China.** On June 20 last year, JD.com fired the first shot, opening its first JD convenience store in Renqiu, Hebei.
For liquor companies, leveraging JD.com's channel sinking to achieve deep national channel penetration is undoubtedly a "win-win" move: it not only saves costs but, more importantly, yields maximum returns with limited investment.
Tmall's new retail experience, represented by "Hema Fresh," not only disrupts and reconstructs people, goods, and scenes, providing customers with new forms of product services, but also offers a fashionable lifestyle, injecting a "stimulant" into activating new markets.
Hema Fresh's model differs greatly from traditional e-commerce and traditional fresh food stores. In terms of store organizational structure, **Hema Fresh focuses on online sales, supplemented by offline sales; it is definitely not just an O2O company.** Its offline stores are experience projects specifically for consumers, and on that basis, they serve as the warehousing, sorting, and distribution center for the online platform Hema APP, integrating online and offline operations to meet the needs of consumers within a 3-kilometer radius for fresh food procurement, dining, and leisure. Most importantly, delivery can be scheduled and delivered within half an hour, offering a first-class consumer experience.
Facing consumption upgrades and the awkward situation of a generational gap between new and old consumer groups, "consumer experience" can be said to be the key for baijiu companies to win over the new generation of consumers. Considering Alibaba's 2 billion platform users (Alibaba's future goal), it's not an exaggeration to say "those who win Alibaba win the world."
**III. The "Cat and Dog" War Intensifies: Are Traditional Wine Merchants Facing a Life-or-Death Crisis?**
The current situation between Tmall and JD.com seems to echo the battles between Gome and Suning, and Didi and Kuaidi. The ultimate outcome was that Gome and Suning, through price wars, "strangled" all competitors in the home appliance industry, only to be intercepted by JD.com; Didi and Kuaidi's burning of cash ultimately changed consumer habits, causing the traditional taxi market to decline sharply.
The notion that online channels will "revolutionize" traditional channels is not new. It was already rampant when liquor companies like Moutai, Yanghe, Wuliangye, Jiannanchun, and Langjiu blocked vertical e-commerce platforms like Yesmywine and 1919, although it ended with "appeasement," it did sound an alarm for traditional channels.
Tmall and JD.com are clearly "well-prepared" and do not intend to "clash head-on" immediately. Instead, they bring technology, big data, huge funds, and consumers from across the country, to closely observe, contact, and study the wine industry, waiting for the best opportunity.
Clearly, **compared to vertical e-commerce, Tmall and JD.com are the true top-level "predators." They are not only more powerful and ambitious but also very patient, planning to strategically and step-by-step devour their "targets."**
At the same time, companies like Moutai and Wuliangye have seen this trend and are actively building their own e-commerce platforms. In 2015, the "IoT Moutai Cloud Platform" (referred to as Moutai Cloud) was launched; in September 2017, the Tmall Moutai Cloud flagship store opened, and Moutai Group explicitly required all distributors to put 30% of the remaining planned quantity of 53-degree Feitian Moutai on the Moutai Cloud platform for sale. **Recently, Moutai held an internal meeting requiring distributors to increase their shipment volume on the cloud platform from 30% to 40%.** Following Moutai, Wuliangye launched its online-offline integrated chain new retail terminal "Wuliang E-Store" in six cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, and Yibin) with six stores starting operational testing, and its accompanying APP was launched simultaneously.
Therefore, in the future, traditional channels will face not only the e-commerce revolution but also pressure from manufacturers. After this wave of "JD.com + Tmall + manufacturers," how many survivors will remain in the channel is a question worth pondering. In this situation, distributors must have a strong sense of crisis, build greater advantages in their areas of expertise such as culture and service, and shape their irreplaceable market value. Otherwise, the life-or-death crisis is indeed not far away.
What are your thoughts on the Cat and Dog War?
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