---
title: "The Future of Intermediaries: A Once-in-a-Century Opportunity"
description: "2021 marks the end of the old business cycle and the beginning of a new one, characterized by intelligent commerce. All entities in the supply-demand chain—producers, suppliers, and distributors—are being redefined, modularized, and reorganized. This shift from industry position competition to ecosystem competition presents a historic opportunity for intermediaries."
author: "任小东"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-04-30"
language: "en"
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# The Future of Intermediaries: A Once-in-a-Century Opportunity

> 2021 marks the end of the old business cycle and the beginning of a new one, characterized by intelligent commerce. All entities in the supply-demand chain—producers, suppliers, and distributors—are being redefined, modularized, and reorganized. This shift from industry position competition to ecosystem competition presents a historic opportunity for intermediaries.

2021 is a special year. I have a profound feeling: 2021 is the full stop of the old business history cycle and the dash of the new business history cycle. The magnificent new business cycle has begun.
**With intelligent commerce as the basic feature, all business entities in the supply-demand chain—production, supply, and sales—are being redefined, re-divided, re-broken and reorganized, and re-modularized.**
Such modularization and platformization are actually the transformation of the original subjects in business competition, from industry position competition in the industrial world to ecosystem competition in the new business ecosystem.
I plan to elaborate on the relationships, evolution, iteration, and roles of three species: brand owners, intermediaries, and retailers.
Today, let's start from the perspective of intermediaries.
**-01-**
**The Past of Distributors: Shooting at Fixed Targets, Very Enjoyable**
Definition of intermediaries:
**1. Distributors:**
Social sales organizations characterized by ownership of goods and regional rights. Includes general agents, first-tier wholesalers, second-tier wholesalers, special distributors, channel distributors, e-commerce distributors, etc.
**2. Agents:**
Social marketing promotion organizations characterized by ownership of marketing service providers. Includes third-party warehousing and distribution service providers, shopping guide agents, roadshow agents, store placement agents, PR agents, advertising agents, etc.
The original eight functions of intermediaries: distribution, promotion, warehousing, delivery, public relations, capital, ordering, and information collection can be summarized into the analytical structure of "cognition, transaction, and relationship."
In the past, this group of intermediaries relied on the authorization and empowerment of brand owners. As long as they obtained distribution and agency rights, they lived very comfortably, creating a large number of "big merchants."
**In the old business era, as long as big merchants were diligent enough, seized opportunities early, positioned themselves ahead of time, laid out plans in advance, and handled upstream and downstream relationships and interests well, with some insight into professional marketing or sales operations, they could reap the "intermediary dividend" of the old business era.**
Many big merchants, after accumulating their first pot of gold in the intermediary field, began forward and backward integration. Some transformed into factory brand owners, such as Mr. Lü Jingang of Huiji and Mr. Zhang of Yanjin Shop; some transformed into retail, such as Mr. Wang Tian of Bubugao and Mr. Yue Lihua of Xingsheng Youxuan.
In my 20 years of professional career, I have seen the rise of too many super big merchants. Since 1994, with China's market-oriented reforms, industrialization, full industry chain, and branding process, they were smart enough, diligent enough, and worked hard to obtain the era's dividends.
China's only two management thinkers, Mr. Zhang Ruimin (the other is Mr. Ren Zhengfei): There are never successful enterprises, only enterprises of the era. Indeed.
These era dividends lasted for 20-30 years.
**-02-**
**The Future of Distributors: Strategic Vision in an Era of Frequent Black Swans**
All these dividends came to an abrupt halt in 2021.
**The first black swan is the COVID-19 pandemic.**
The community e-commerce it spawned, with a devastating momentum, caught offline retail entities and online B2C e-commerce—the first and second poles of the old business—off guard and threw them into chaos. Community e-commerce has become the third pole of business and a typical representative of new business.
Community e-commerce has a future track space of 10 trillion yuan, with nearly hundreds of billions in market investment over the next 5-10 years, gradually building a new logistics fulfillment system covering cities from first to sixth tier.
This system is BC-integrated, a brand-new infrastructure system.
This new infrastructure system is historic and epoch-making. Whether there will be another one in the future, I estimate there won't be within 20 years.
Many intermediaries, whether self-operated or franchised, single-point or nationwide, will take advantage of the "burning money" competition to extract benefits from capital and platforms, using the fake to cultivate the real, and complete the maturity of their business models.
**The second black swan is economic rise.**
With the irreversibility of Sino-US confrontation, the dual circulation pattern of China's economy has affected the disposable income, consumption awareness, and consumption behavior of all Chinese residents. The fourth consumption era is arriving ahead of schedule. People are gradually accepting the "what you see is what you get" shopping experience and the closed-loop experience.
With China's world-leading mobile internet infrastructure in full swing and the acceleration of 5G, people are also gradually accepting the great transparency of product information. Goods are moving, people are moving, and places are moving.
You may be reached by various touchpoints anytime, anywhere, whether these touchpoints are QR codes, videos, images, copy, scenes, hardware, VR, or AI. People need cognition, transactions, and delivery 24/7, anytime, anywhere.
This sense of gain was completely absent in the past. This is a new lifestyle and attitude, gradually spreading from young groups to all age groups, whether men, women, the elderly, or children.
The era of revolution in consumption behavior, consumption awareness, and consumption chains for all people has begun.
Through such consumption experiences, individuals "employ" various apps to express themselves. Such expression is immediate, fast, high-experience, with circle attributes, and social currency.
Both retail terminals and C-end consumers have changed. Have many of our intermediaries changed?
Last year, I communicated with many intermediary friends, who said business was painful. Clinging to the old world's operational routines, in the great changes of the new world, they seem unable to keep up. The entire intermediary group has never been so painful.
**The third black swan is intelligent commerce.**
This black swan actually began to appear in 2012, but distributors only started to feel the pain in the last 5 years and began to actively embrace it. And 2021 is such a historical node of old and new alternation.
All functions online is only the first step of intelligent commerce, just the basic work to improve connectivity. But many distributors still haven't achieved this.
At the giant level, Alibaba's Lingshoutong and JD's Jingxitong; in the industry, Wang Chaocheng's Yijiupi; regionally, Dongguan's Meiyijia, Hunan's Furong Xingxing, Xinqiao Gao, Shanghai's Kuaile Laizhang, Chengdu's Rongcheng Yigou, Fuzhou's Youdehuo, Zhengzhou's Tongzhanggui, Xi'an's Jiaping Yunshi, etc.
These platforms, I believe, are all "super first-tier wholesalers" or "super second-tier wholesalers."
The highlight of these platforms lies in the complete analytical framework of "cognition, transaction, and relationship," where transaction functions, warehousing and distribution functions, and even capital functions can be digitized.
The dilemma is that cognition and relationship functions are not yet digitized enough; they are all single-point values, segment by segment.
They are all information islands.
No way out. In such a dilemma, brand owners are the "chain masters."
In the old business, the benefit distribution system and distribution pattern of large brand owners determined that their digitization is "luxurious decoration" (as Mr. Liu Chunxiong said).
The second and third steps of intelligent commerce for intermediaries are datafication and digital intelligence.
Datafication and digital intelligence require the intermediary group to step out of individual information islands. **Vertically, connect points into lines, lines into networks, building city networks, provincial networks, regional networks, and national networks.**
**Horizontally, it is necessary to connect all sales channels, all retail outlets, and real-time inventory upstream and downstream, truly providing brand owners with the value of "one inventory for the region" and "one inventory for the country."**
From the commonality of the intermediary group, it is necessary for leaders with great pattern, future vision, and values to stand up, starting from city networks, and then promoting the construction of provincial, regional, and national networks.
The TO C side's S.F. Express, STO, YTO, ZTO, and Yunda have completed the historical process of network construction. Is the historical process of the TO B side far behind?
The construction of the TO B side will inevitably be accompanied by the generation of dividends. So who can eat this wave of distributor transformation and upgrading dividends?
Based on industry insights, my personal view: **From the perspective of big merchants, in this wave of transformation dividends, no more than 3 will emerge from a single city, no more than 3 from a single large category (snacks, beverages, tail goods), and no more than 3 from a single province.**
As for more category operators or second-tier wholesalers accounting for over 70%, the probability of emerging is very low, and even if they do, they won't exceed this rule.
In the future, the entire track will not allow more distributors. The distributor group will gradually become "big merchant-ized," "super modular," "nationally networked," and "LP-ized." Their numbers will decrease, but individual scale will increase, and functional focus will be reduced to platforms, such as supply chain finance platforms, BC-integrated warehousing and fulfillment platforms, and marketing promotion platforms.
**This is the worst of times; the dividends of the old business are gradually melting, differentiating, and disappearing.**
**This is the best of times; the dividends of the new business are rapidly sprouting, aggregating, and fissioning.**
The future of intermediaries: a once-in-a-century historical opportunity is at hand!
If the report is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.


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