Click to read the original article for details Source: Ginkgo Finance In 2021, the retail big-box sector collectively hit the rocks. First, "Little Walmart" Renrenle closed 19 stores within half a year; then, Yonghui Superstores, the only supermarket chain to see both revenue and net profit growth in 2020, saw its market value halve; in the home furnishing sector, Red Star Macalline, once the "Global Mall King," is now barely surviving by "selling off family assets." Suning, which like Macalline fell into a capital chain crisis, has already changed dynasties, with Huang replacing Zhang. How should mature traditional enterprises adjust and transform themselves when facing high debt pressure and attacks from revolutionaries? This is probably the most frequently asked question in the physical retail industry in recent years. Over the past turbulent four decades, "urbanization" has been wound up, real estate has embraced marketization, and along with the reform of the circulation system, the retail industry has followed changes in the market environment, feeling its way forward like crossing a river by touching stones. In 2008, economics professor Zhou Yong divided China's commercial retail development into three stages: The first stage was dominated by alternative competition, with defeating traditional formats as the main theme. The second stage was marked by Sino-foreign competition, bringing marketization and standardization to the forefront, catalyzing further changes in circulation formats. The third stage was marked by property rights reform, where non-retail "investors," armed with capital, technology, and talent, took over chain companies that had already reached scale. Most traditional retailers that were active on the commercial stage in the past broke through in the second stage and grew stronger in the third. In the special period of this specific land of China, they did not have absolute advantages, but they gradually developed and grew in confrontations with foreign capital and the old system, showing their heroic nature. If time had stayed in the first three stages described by Professor Zhou, the market might have continued to maintain a pattern of diverse department stores and supermarkets. But the rapidly changing era soon pushed the industry into a fourth stage. With the popularization of mobile internet, the demand for digital innovation in China's retail industry grew day by day. After traditional businesses went online, most left behind only a stirring and tragic song. Looking back, RT-Mart launched Feiniu.com, Suning created Suning.com, and Yonghui, Renrenle, Red Star Macalline... almost every store had its own app. The operators behind these enterprises did not lack strategic vision. They were heroes of the industry, raising waves in great rivers. But moving forward, they faced either total defeat or a change of sovereignty, and those who remained could only watch their enterprises decline. A great era is fading away. As the first generation of Chinese retail, we might now be able to trace the path of their decline from their former glory.
Dancing with Wolves: "The Wolf is Coming!" In 1995, Beijing's retail circle collectively gasped. South of the Beijing International Exhibition Center, an 8,000-square-meter big-box store rose from the ground. Facing this prepared enemy, surrounding department stores all felt a sense of crisis. That year, relevant national ministries had just issued the "Interim Provisions on Guiding Foreign Investment Direction" and the "Catalogue for Guiding Foreign Investment Industries," beginning to allow "limited absorption of foreign investment." Li Lanqing, then Vice Premier of the State Council, at a national chain operation pilot meeting chaired in Shanghai, put forward the thesis that chain operation was an important direction. Reform and opening up were like arrows on the string, aimed at the next decade's themes for the retail industry: chain stores and foreign capital. Overseas retail giants responded swiftly. Two months later, Walmart applied to set up a controlled joint venture in Shenzhen. Carrefour, hindered by strict approval processes at the time, chose to "build a plank road in the open and cross Chencang in secret," borrowing the local government's path, laying the groundwork for later expansion. The big-box store at the Beijing International Exhibition Center was Carrefour's first store in the Chinese market. In the six years before entering the mainland market, Carrefour had already used the Taiwan market as a "training ground," familiarizing itself with Chinese consumer habits over several years. By 1997, Carrefour had opened three stores on the mainland. Shortly after the new store in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, opened, it welcomed a mysterious customer. This was a tall, middle-aged man. He would sometimes look around the store's displays, sometimes run to the rice noodle shop across the street to write and draw. Occasionally, when staff weren't paying attention, he would quietly open the door of the fresh food cold storage and take a look. If discovered, he would laugh and say, "Sorry, wrong door." During the mysterious customer's 37 days of wandering around Carrefour, other customers gradually noticed that 2.5 kilometers away from the Nanshan Carrefour, there was a little-known supermarket, Renrenle, which was becoming more and more like Carrefour. Soon, Renrenle and Carrefour engaged in a promotional price war. A year and a half later, Carrefour's sales halved, while Renrenle's sales climbed from less than 20,000 to over 600,000. The international giant raised the white flag. To avoid vicious competition, the two shook hands and made peace. Carrefour, which boasted that "no business within three kilometers can survive," was thrown off balance by an unknown in its range. This battle also made the boss of Renrenle Supermarket—the mysterious customer who had staked out Carrefour for 37 days—He Jinming, famous. Carrefour was well-versed in the chameleon's way, able to adjust strategies rapidly like a chameleon during overseas expansion. During his stakeout at Carrefour, He Jinming observed this important trait. He recorded over 400 pages of notes at the rice noodle shop across the street, cracking Carrefour's acclaimed "chameleon strategy." At that time, Renrenle not only copied Carrefour's display arrangements but also changed promotional strategies more frequently. Carrefour changed once a day, while Renrenle changed two or three times a day. To cope, Carrefour's store manager, Dalton, had to lead teams to visit Renrenle three times a day—morning, noon, and evening. "The greatest cleverness of the Chinese is change. They learn and change, and they change faster than you," He Jinming later summarized. He Jinming, who resigned at 44 to start his own business, fired a beautiful shot in Shenzhen. Although he was only defending a small store, in hindsight it was quite revolutionary—this was probably the first case of a local retailer challenging the highest retail operating standards. Three years later, Renrenle had a head-on confrontation with Walmart. He Jinming again used flexible tactics to defeat the foreign guns. At that time, Walmart's China Operations Director, Li Chengjie, even lamented: "In China, the only company that can compete face-to-face with Walmart and continue to develop is Renrenle." Li Chengjie was wrong. Renrenle was indeed the only local enterprise in Shenzhen that had "hand-to-hand combat" with international retail giants like Walmart and Carrefour. But He Jinming was not the only challenger. Those giants that had "pre-rehearsed" before entering China might not have imagined that the strong enemies they would face in China would come from the markets they had once educated.
Learning from the Enemy In July 1998, at Huang Mingduan's command, RT-Mart in Zhabei District, Shanghai, transformed from a warehouse model into a big-box store that consumers could enter at any time. The following year, RT-Mart changed its deserted state and achieved revenue of 24 billion RMB. Huang Mingduan was the general personally chosen by Yin Yanliang, president of Taiwan's Ruentex Group. He was probably the most legendary figure in the retail industry. This future king of hypermarkets had once been a small-time thug standing guard at a casino entrance. His early gangster experience might have been the breeding ground for Huang Mingduan's bravery. When Ruentex decided to enter the mainland to open big-box stores, Huang Mingduan made two military pledges: one was to open 100 stores on the mainland within ten years, and the other was to surpass Walmart and Carrefour to become the market leader. A middle-aged outsider daring to set such goals sounded like a fantasy at the time. The giants he benchmarked had already been scientifically using information tools since the 1960s to manage procurement, sales, transportation, and inventory, achieving cross-regional multi-store management and greatly improving the speed of goods circulation and turnover efficiency. Walmart had even built a computer satellite communication system in the 1980s. Through the satellite network, headquarters could take inventory of all stores worldwide—over 10,000—within an hour, checking stock, shelf placement, and sales quantities. Looking at local supermarkets at the time, they relied more on China's cheap land and demographic dividends, "skinny dipping" in the market. For them, these foreign retail giants were both enemies and "Whampoa Military Academy." Similar to He Jinming, Huang Mingduan was also a master of "stealing knowledge." His specialty was to first imitate, then surpass. By studying business models, Huang Mingduan summarized a "middle way" between centralization and decentralization: the center was responsible for store opening, procurement, and distribution, while pricing, membership management, and in-store displays were left to local autonomy. After China joined the WTO, world retail giants accelerated their pace of conquering the Chinese market. RT-Mart still relied on Huang Mingduan's "middle way" to embark on an astonishing expansion path. In the first quarter of 2009, RT-Mart surpassed Carrefour and Walmart in both average sales per store and total sales, taking the top spot among foreign retail enterprises on the mainland and becoming the second-largest chain retail enterprise in the mainland market. By 2015, RT-Mart's sales growth had never fallen below 15%. None of its nearly 300 big-box stores nationwide had closed. RT-Mart's learning from the enemy created a Chinese supermarket era. In Fujian, a company that started with "agriculture-to-supermarket" reform, Yonghui Superstores, was closely following RT-Mart's footsteps. The founders of Yonghui Superstores were two brothers, Zhang Xuansong and Zhang Xuanning. Before 2000, Yonghui Superstores was just a lamb waiting to be slaughtered. Facing the aggressive foreign giants, Zhang Xuansong believed that "only by changing, doing what the giants cannot do, can we survive." He identified the blue ocean of the fresh food market, responded to policy calls, and brought the farmer's market into the supermarket through the "agriculture-to-supermarket" model. Through the Zhang brothers' efforts, Yonghui Superstores became a model of this reform. At the end of 2001, the Vice Premier personally inspected Yonghui Superstores, and "agriculture-to-supermarket" gained a new name: the Yonghui Model. Ten years later, people found that Yonghui had traces of RT-Mart's past in supply chain management, cost control, and business model shaping. Tracing the roots, it might be related to the full participation of a group of managers from Taiwan in Yonghui's operations around 2011. At its peak, Yonghui's market value once reached hundreds of billions. Zhang Xuansong and Zhang Xuanning entered the Hurun Rich List with fortunes of 13 billion and 7.5 billion RMB, respectively. Whether it was Renrenle, RT-Mart, or Yonghui, they all beat foreign enterprises back in the retail rankings in those years. In 2007, foreign supermarkets still occupied half of the top ten Chinese chain supermarkets. Ten years later, in the 2017 top ten list, only Walmart, Carrefour, and Metro remained.
At the Crossroads Wolves are animals adept at creating living space in harsh environments, with strong endurance and cooperative abilities. In those years, the combat capability of frontline retail stores was almost universally characterized by "wolf nature." Because relative to producers and wholesalers, stores are at the end of the commodity circulation chain, where the battle is fierce, leaving no room for hesitation or timidity. As the wolf king, one needed to organize a strong team force among fierce competitors. RT-Mart employees gave Huang Mingduan the nickname "Wolf King," and in the retail department store sector, the one who could wear this crown was none other than Zhang Jindong. In the exhibition hall of Suning's Nanjing headquarters building, a photo is still displayed, reprinted from the front page headline of the May 22, 1993 issue of Yangtze Evening News. It is an advertisement listing the cost price, factory price, and retail price of air conditioning brands on the market. This was Zhang Jindong's declaration of war against the old planned economy system. At that time, his company had only 15 employees, and the media joked that it was "a small sampan against an aircraft carrier." This boldness was comparable to Huang Mingduan's willingness to make military pledges. In their prime, the two "wolf kings" probably never imagined they would have deeper intersections in the future. In 1998, 35-year-old Zhang Jindong, along with Sun Weimin and others, spent 3 days in Zhongguancun, visiting the Zhongguancun Management Committee, 8848, and Sina.com. At that time, in Zhongguancun, the shadow of the internet was everywhere. That year, retail department stores and big-box stores were running toward two extremes. Zhang Jindong felt Suning had reached a crossroads of fate. On one side was the desolation after flooding. The 1997 Asian financial crisis spread, and the overall profit rate of the national department store industry was only 2.74%. 1998 was even called the "year of department store closures." On the other side was the rapid development of world retail chains, with market logic undergoing earth-shaking changes. In the era of shortage economy, department stores had everything from needles to electrical appliances. As long as the store had sufficient supply, it didn't worry about selling. But with the development of chain formats, upstream bargaining power increased, and prices became lower and lower. People began to accelerate their departure from traditional department store formats, and Zhang Jindong was one of the earliest "revolutionaries" to sound the horn. During the 3 days in Zhongguancun, Zhang Jindong kept thinking about Suning's future: should it adopt physical chains, or put a networked computer in residential areas to sell products? Logistics, credit, payment systems, consumers' online shopping habits... the problems that came at him pressed on his mind like mountains. He smelled business opportunities, but whether to go or not, he felt indecisive. Zhang Jindong once said that Suning always challenges its own limits. But in doing e-commerce, he adopted a middle-of-the-road strategy that balanced both sides. He first shelved the idea of operating e-commerce and transformed toward a comprehensive electrical appliance chain retail model. To do this, Suning cut 50% of its wholesale business, sparking a wave of opposition. In the e-commerce field, Zhang Jindong still made small-scale attempts. He tried cooperating with Sina to launch an electrical appliance mall, and, encouraged by consulting firms, also launched China Home Appliances Online. But Zhang Jindong never invested on a large scale. On one hand, he believed China did not yet have the foundation for large-scale e-commerce. On the other hand, retail giants at the time generally held the view that e-commerce was their opposite, and engaging in e-commerce was tantamount to revolution against themselves. Many years later, people like to describe the rise of e-commerce as a "dimensional reduction strike" against the traditional retail industry. This description is like the two-dimensional foil thrown by the Singer civilization in "The Three-Body Problem," which lightly reduces the solar system to two dimensions. But looking at that time and space, everything seemed to unfold on a flat plane. No one knew that a few years later, SARS would break the situation. No one knew that the internet could move on its own in the future. In 1999, Suning's flagship store on Xinjiekou, Nanjing, officially opened, marking Suning's formal transformation from an air conditioning specialty to a national chain of comprehensive electrical appliances. After completing the transformation, Zhang Jindong's eyes were left with only one enemy: Gome. After Huang Guangyu was imprisoned, Suning seized the opportunity to accelerate and finally achieved a full overtake in 2011. When fate is on an upward slope, all favorable conditions come quickly and confidently. At that time, Suning even started building its own logistics system nationwide earlier than JD.com, claiming in 2012 that its self-built logistics could cover more than 1,000 cities across the country. But who could have imagined that Suning was only enjoying its last glory?
The Leverage Era At the turn of the millennium, Wang Jianlin announced that Wanda would formally withdraw from residential real estate and enter commercial real estate. In his narrative, the idea for this transformation came with dramatic flair and a sense of brotherhood. That year, two veteran Wanda employees fell seriously ill. Wang Jianlin spent two to three million yuan on their treatment and felt worried: when employees retire, there must be a place to reimburse medical expenses, right? Residential real estate is built and sold one by one—what can the enterprise retain? Based on this "big brother" sense of responsibility, Wang Jianlin posed the most severe business proposition: sustainable operation. To ensure a continuous cash flow, building and collecting rent was the only way. As Wanda decided to transform, another man, Che Jianxin, a carpenter by trade, made a similar decision. At that time, the government had already abolished the welfare housing distribution policy. His sixth sense told him that China would usher in an era of rapid real estate development. Drawing inspiration from KFC, Che Jianxin had pioneered the home furnishing chain store model in China. But because the entire ecosystem from production to sales had to be completed by himself, Red Star Macalline suffered severe capital turnover problems under rapid expansion. After encountering a turnover crisis in 1996, Che Jianxin decided to abandon the all-inclusive business model and, riding the wave of development, began a massive "land enclosure movement." The model of buying land and building malls was quickly replicated in major cities across the country within a few years. In 2008, Che Jianxin's sixth sense was validated. Domestic land prices and commercial property fees began to soar, and Red Star Macalline's total assets quintupled within three years. After tasting the sweetness, Che Jianxin realized that land should be fully utilized and not just for furniture malls. Soon, Red Star Real Estate Co., Ltd. was established in Shanghai, and Che Jianxin officially entered the real estate field. Commercial real estate, residential, and real estate officially became the three carriages of Red Star Macalline, pulling it up to rank 58th in the industry. In contrast, Wanda's transformation path was somewhat circuitous. In 2002, Wang Jianlin proposed the concept of "urban complex": build commercial centers, introduce merchants, create pedestrian streets, and then build office buildings and apartments around the commercial center... Attract customers through commerce, then drive up shop rents and property prices. This process almost became the template for all subsequent urban commercial development. But at that time, Wanda's residential projects were basically sold out at the drawing board stage. Some questioned Wang Jianlin: why invest such huge amounts in a completely unfamiliar commercial real estate project? Facing doubts, Wang Jianlin fully leveraged his advantages as a private enterprise boss. He resolutely tested the first commercial real estate project in Changchun. After achieving success, he continued to roll it out. The operational methods of Wang Jianlin and Che Jianxin added a new business model to China's retail department store industry—one tied to land. After Wanda Department Store emerged, like Wanda Cinema, it became a derivative format supporting Wanda Plaza. At its peak, Wanda Department Store had 110 stores nationwide. Together with commercial real estate, cultural industry, and high-end hotels, it became one of Wanda Group's four pillar industries, driving Wanda onto the fast track of development. It was also at the most triumphant moment that Wang Jianlin uttered those words: "In any industry Wanda enters, no state-owned or central enterprise can be the leader." In 2015, after leaving a trail of "money scattering" across half the globe, Wang Jianlin said, "Within five years, Wanda will no longer be a real estate enterprise, but completely a high-tech service company." Red Star Macalline, meanwhile, was frantically building buildings. Its commercial real estate volume even surpassed Wanda, making it once the world's largest commercial mall operator.
The Wolf King Cuts Off His Arm In 2018, Huang Mingduan resigned. The "Wolf King" who had led RT-Mart for 19 years officially left Sun Art Retail. RT-Mart employees probably cannot forget January of that year. They were still immersed in the joy of Alibaba's shareholding, but overnight, Huang Mingduan became "the one who won all opponents but lost to the times." The "Wolf King" was not defeated by industry giants like Walmart or Carrefour, but by the "outsider" Alibaba. It was lamentable. In November 2017, Alibaba Group invested a total of about HK$22.4 billion (approximately US$2.88 billion), directly and indirectly holding 36.16% of Sun Art Retail's shares. Sun Art Retail and Alibaba were like the Arab and the camel in Aesop's fable. Facing Alibaba's pleas, Sun Art Retail repeatedly softened and finally let Alibaba into its tent, squeezing out the original team. Looking at the market, supermarket giants were even more defeated: Metro exited China, Walmart went through store closures, Carrefour first joined forces with Tencent and Yonghui, then sold itself to Suning. In the domestic market, Renrenle once stood on the brink of delisting, and the already retired He Jinming had to announce his comeback to save the market; Tencent took a stake in Yonghui, but as the conflict between Zhang Xuansong and Zhang Xuanning escalated, internal strife laid the groundwork for the later wave of store closures... The flip side of the supermarket industry's decline was the prosperity of e-commerce. In 2019, China's internet users reached nearly 900 million, with an internet penetration rate of 61.2%. In 2019, mobile online retail sales accounted for 90.2% of total online retail. The former dividends of economy, land, and population were no longer favorable shields in this technological revolution. In the rise and fall, the "wolf kings" who once led the supermarket industry to glory almost all suffered indiscriminate blows. The media preferred to mock them with a line from "The Three-Body Problem": "To destroy you, what has it to do with you?" And the big-box model leveraged on land also began to become unsustainable. In 2019, Red Star Macalline, with a market value of 79.877 billion yuan, surpassed Vanke and China State Construction, ranking first in the construction industry for consecutive years on the A-share corporate ranking. However, its main furniture business was severely shrinking, accounting for only 30% of total business. Che Jianxin tirelessly "bought, bought, bought." The former home furnishing enterprise had transformed into a real estate company. Relying on land advantages, Red Star once reaped huge profits. In the golden age of real estate, when houses sold well, the home furnishing industry naturally had no worries about food and drink. Red Star Macalline maintained this parasitic relationship well. Until last year, when real estate began to cool down, the home furnishing industry was implicated. Against the backdrop of "deleveraging" across the entire real estate industry, Che Jianxin still chose to increase leverage against the trend, spending nearly 20 billion yuan to acquire land, and also taking over 4.7 billion yuan of Jinke shares sold by Sunac, which were then used for pledge financing. With a debt of 100 billion yuan, Red Star Macalline could only choose to cut flesh to survive this year. To fill the huge pit, many of its commercial real estate projects were closed or transferred, and even 18% of the equity of the high-quality asset Red Star Qifa was sold to COSCO Shipping. In an environment where the tolerance for capital operation errors has greatly decreased, one wrong step means you cannot survive the difficulties. And this self-amputation behavior was started earlier by Wang Jianlin. Starting in 2017, Wanda kept "selling, selling, selling." Two years later, Zhang Jindong took over 37 Wanda Department Store stores, making Suning "heavier." Zhang Jindong's investments and expansions have been carried out boldly over the years: Suning Finance, Suning Logistics, Suning Xiaodian, acquiring Carrefour China, and incorporating 37 Wanda stores under his command, but every move seemed to be after the fact. Just as Gree's phone boot screen became a laughingstock, Suning's step-by-step imitation of the internet was once ridiculed in the industry as "suit e-commerce," meaning employees had to wear formal attire to work. Zhang Jindong's "middle way" attitude toward the internet had already shown signs of the later defeat when Suning first stood at the crossroads of fate.
Extinction or Rebirth? From heroes of the era to abandoned pawns of fate, in the nearly 30 years of development of China's retail industry, the collective defeat of the "wolf kings" has played out as a series of tragic songs. But behind the lament, we must reflect: why have traditional retail formats rarely escaped unscathed when facing the dimensional reduction strike of technology? An unavoidable human fact is that entrepreneurs basking in the glory of kingship are also prone to falling into path dependence in their thinking. Imagine: if a person has continuously obtained excess returns using a certain strategy over the past five to ten years, they may find it difficult to realize the hidden errors in that strategy. Even after one or two years of strategy failure, most people will continue to believe in and adopt it. What people find hard to give up are often the sunk costs behind decisions, personal reputation, and insistence on their own judgment. Luo Zhenyu once told a joke about a deaf person watching firecrackers. He saw a beautiful paper roll that scattered in an instant and was very surprised. Some use this joke to mock traditional retail entrepreneurs: the deaf person's sensory world lacks an auditory dimension, so they cannot understand how firecrackers are ignited. A plane tree cannot grow roses. If one cannot understand the business dimension, it is indeed lamentable. But the greater possibility is that entrepreneurs see the problems but stick to their own reasoning. As sharp as Zhang Jindong, he had already smelled the direction of the internet as early as 1998. By the time of the second transformation in 2012, Suning had nearly 180,000 employees from its Nanjing headquarters to terminal chain stores in various regions. A true giant aircraft carrier cannot turn around on a dime; any decision it makes can lead to hitting reefs or running aground. This is also why Zhang Jindong, when seeing internet e-commerce giants exploring offline, blindly judged that the logic of offline counterattacking online was valid. In the early days of the new retail revolution, to alleviate offline difficulties, entrants almost tried every new format. Besides the illusion of national large-scale retail enterprises having self-operated online businesses, even many regional KA-level retailers once had concerns about cooperating with third-party platforms. But the problem is that the business model and cost model designed around stores are far more expensive and difficult than the cost requirements of using stores as warehouses for online order fulfillment. It seems no one has clearly thought about what new retail means to them. Using one's own weaknesses to attack the opponent's strengths—is this really wise? Wang Jianlin once mentioned his success secret in an autobiography: "What others dare not do, I dare! What others do not do, I do!" This all-encompassing boldness best summarizes the psychological characteristics of that generation of entrepreneurs. They experienced an era of great rivers, but courage was no longer the only passport. After experiencing his "Waterloo," Wang Jianlin offered another model to the generation of "wolf kings": during the five years of dormancy, Wanda sprinted on the path of asset-light. All overseas investments were sold off, and through multiple business segments "selling, selling, selling," it shed fat and gained muscle, ultimately completely jumping out of the "high income + high risk" model. The wolf king cuts off his arm to survive. But how many can succeed? Now, Yonghui no longer mentions "new retail." After profit shrinkage, the closure of Super Species, and large-scale store closures of Yonghui Mini, Zhang Xuansong has brought out the "warehouse-style" breakthrough, but the difficulties under high debt ratios are hard to hide. Renrenle has no hope of turning losses around and closed 19 stores. He Jinming, the former richest man in Jiangxi, has seen his fortune shrink by 95%, leaving only 400 million yuan. Red Star Macalline, dragged down by non-current assets, sold Red Star Real Estate, which had sales of over 40 billion yuan, to the platform company Tianjin Yuanpu for 4 billion yuan—truly "selling a son to survive." As for Suning, after last year's pandemic, its strained facade and cash flow finally cracked. Zhang Jindong's resignation completely pushed Suning toward Alibaba, but can Huang Mingduan's comeback bring a "RT-Mart-style" miracle to Suning? On one side are Suning's old subordinates, on the other are Alibaba's new faction. Where will the undercurrent of power lead Suning? How can a generation of "wolf kings" ensure they do not become puppets and walk out of their own rhythm? Extinction or rebirth? That is a question.
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