According to people familiar with the matter, last year Meituan invested about 10 billion yuan in community group buying business, while Pinduoduo invested 6-7 billion yuan.

Author｜Dong Jie Yang Lin

Edit | Yang Xuan

The community group buying war is entering a new stage.

Exclusively learned from multiple independent sources, after the Spring Festival, the community group buying giants have established their goals for 2021: Meituan Optimal will lock the annual GMV at 200 billion and will hit 50-60 million per day Duoduomai’s GMV target for 2021 is 150 billion; Orange Heart is preferably 100 billion, and Xingsheng is about 80 billion. To verify this, Meituan, Pinduoduo and Xingsheng Youyou did not respond.

This means that all companies have set high goals for doubling their performance this year. A comparable data is that the optimal GMV of Xingsheng in 2020 is 40 billion, and the GMV of Shihui Group and Tongcheng Life are both around 10 billion. At the recent fourth quarter financial report meeting, Meituan CEO Wang Xing disclosed that in the second half of December 2020, Meituan’s preferred order volume has exceeded 20 million orders per day.

As far as the current progress is concerned, according to people familiar with the matter, after the Spring Festival, Meituan’s preferred order volume has stabilized at 23 million per day, with a daily peak of 27 million; in contrast, buy more orders The amount is around 20 million, and Xingsheng prefers close to 15 million orders.

Currently, the unit price of Duoduomai and Meituan Optimal is around 8 yuan, while Orange Heart Optimal is around 5 yuan. From this calculation, the average daily GMV of Meituan Optimal is 180 million, and the average daily GMV of Meituan Optimal is 1.6. 100 million up and down (this data had reached 180 million before the Spring Festival). According to people familiar with the matter, the average daily GMV after the holiday of Orange Heart Optimal is close to 100 million yuan, “it has resumed growth from the Spring Festival.” Recently, Orange Heart Optimal has increased its subsidies in key areas again, and the single quantity is approaching Duoduobuy.

So, how to evaluate the community group buying business? On the evening of March 29, Wumart Group submitted a listing prospectus. The prospectus showed that On March 26, Wumart and Orange Heart Optimal signed a subscription agreement to subscribe for the latter at a consideration of up to 100 million US dollars for no more than 2%. Based on this estimate, the valuation of Orange Center may reach 5 billion U.S. dollars. In the context of business data that is not as good as Meituan Optimal and Duoduomaicai, the valuation of the latter two will most likely exceed this. After completing a financing of 3 billion US dollars before, Xingsheng’s preferred valuation is 8 billion US dollars.

In 2021, in addition to the GMV goals, the community group buying giants will also be more sophisticated in their play. “At present, Duoduomaicai accounts for 60% of the traffic in the station. This year (Duodumaicai) aims to increase BD, recruit team leaders, increase the traffic on WeChat, and seizeThe core users of other homes. “

According to people familiar with the matter, the product categories of various companies will also be adjusted this year, and low-unit-price products will be reduced. Meituan’s preferred target unit price is 10 yuan or more. “However, it is not realistic to greatly reduce subsidies in the short term. Expand the SKU category and increase the high unit price products to increase the growth. This year Meituan will increase the number of SKUs from 1,000 to 2,000 (or at least 1,500), and optimize the performance link to make the UE model more attractive.”

This is largely a reference to Prosperity Optimization. Before the giants enter the community group buying track, Xingsheng prefers to reduce the proportion of fresh food (currently from 33% to 25-26%) and increase products with high unit prices (such as mobile phones, electronic products, furniture, etc.) ), has achieved profitability in some core areas. People familiar with the matter told that the current gross profit of the fresh products (including losses) of Meituan Optimal, Duoduomai and Orange Heart Optimal are generally negative, and the gross profits of other categories are generally less than 10%. ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Whether the customer unit price and gross profit margin can increase will largely determine whether the giants can successfully complete the 2021 GMV target.

At the level of grid warehouse construction, a meeting summary obtained shows that as of mid-March of this year, the number of grid warehouses for Dodo Shopping is roughly 400-500, Xingsheng 600-700, and Meituan 1300. . However, Xingsheng Optimal cut down about 200 grid warehouses during logistics optimization last year.

“The goal is to merge the grid warehouses and build them into a second-level urban warehouse (1000-2000 level), which will assume part of the functions of the general warehouse.” An insider close to Xingsheng’s optimization told us. In the past six months, according to media reports, a number of regional grid warehouses in Duoduomai have closed. One of the core of Duoduomai this year is to optimize the cost of the contract. According to industry estimates, if the current unit price is maintained, Meituan Optimal and Duoduomai can make a profit by reducing the performance cost to less than 0.6 yuan, but there is still a lot of gap between the two companies.

Previously, a Meituan preferred grid warehouse franchisee in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai region disclosed to Meituan that in order to optimize the grid warehouse operation process, Meituan will require its grid warehouses to add cameras, real-time monitoring, and each The process is digitized, and refined adjustments are made through data operations; in addition, Meituan prefers to send headquarters personnel to the station one after another to keep an eye on the operation process.

After relying on the Hema Bazaar to test the waters for a period of time, Ali also recently established an MMC business group, focusing on community group buying business, integrating the community group buying business of Retail Link and Hema Bazaar. The business group leader is an Ali partner Dai Shan, she is also the president of Ali’s B2B business group.

Although Dai Shan stated in the open letter that the MMC business group is different from the current community group buying model. Its model is “near-field e-commerce”, but many people believe that this is Ali’s integration of group resources and community group buying. Initiatives. And this business obviously faces many challenges. OneAn Ali insider who has inspected the front-line competition is symmetrical, “On the one hand, we have to face the problem of operational cooperation with Shihui Group (Shihui Group has now all been connected to the Taobao shopping portal), and on the other hand, it is too late in the early stage. Many, especially in the performance of the contract, need to make up a lot of lessons.”

Some people in the industry symmetrically say that when “Taobao Buying Vegetables” is connected to the Shihui Group and the Hema Market at the same time, the current order volume still mainly depends on the Shihui Group; but in the total order volume of the Shihui Group, Taobao shopping traffic accounted for only 20%, and the official Shihui Mission confirmed this figure. This shows that users’ minds about shopping on Taobao have not yet been fully established. On April 1 this year, Shihui Group announced the completion of the D round of 750 million US dollars of financing, and Ali led the investment again, which shows that Ali still has not given up on the business logic of “outward investment, internal integration” in community group purchases.

After receiving US$3 billion in financing, Prosperity Optimal will also make a national layout this year. Currently, except for “Beijing and Shanghai + Three Eastern Provinces + Inner Mongolia⻘hai⻄Tibet Hainan”, Prosperity Optimal has covered nearly 200 locations in 18 provinces Level cities, Meitu You, Duoduo Mai Cai, and Orange Hearts have all covered more than 300 prefecture-level cities.

Some people in the capital market revealed that Meituan invested roughly RMB 10 billion in community group buying business last year, while Pinduoduo invested RMB 6-7 billion. This year, Meituan’s investment may reach RMB 20 billion. Will continue to increase investment-to verify this, Meituan and Pinduoduo both declined to comment. Although in the past four quarters, Meituan and Duoduo’s losses in new businesses have expanded visually, but this close hand-to-hand battle has not been able to determine the winner in a short period of time. The next step is to compete for internal strength.