Title from Oriental IC
At the critical moment when people can’t go out, the army of selling vegetables welcomes a new crossover: Sinopec.
Sinopec, which started selling coffee last year, is now starting to sell vegetables again. Sinopec’s argument is that in order to meet the needs of epidemic prevention and control and provide more services to car owners, Sinopec Beijing Petroleum Company contacted vegetable supply companies to launch a “safe food shopping” business, and this business will continue in the future. The variety of goods will be more abundant.
A petrol station sells vegetables. Can Sinopec’s another dimension-breaking operation work?
Can gas stations buy food reliably?
According to public reports and part of the user experience, gas stations do not need to get off the car to buy food-users place orders through the “One-click refueling” in the “Easy Refueling” APP, and then use the “One-click to reach the car” “Vegetable gift pack combination” page for purchase, and then the gas station staff put the product directly into the customer’s trunk.
The gift package includes eggs and more than ten kinds of daily basic vegetables, such as tomatoes, beans, carrots, broccoli, etc. The goal is to meet the needs of a family of three for three days. These dishes are directly picked by Sinopec from vegetable production bases such as Xiaotangshan and Shounong Farm. After screening, they are packed in boxes and distributed to gas stations for picking and selling on the same day. Today, there are 340 Sinopec gas stations in Beijing that have opened the “grocery shopping” business, and the daily vegetable sales are around 600 boxes.
In addition to the delivery to the car, the APP already has the option of delivering vegetables packages to your home at the “fast speed next day” option (below) , There are four kinds of vegetable packages on the so-called “Xiaotangshan Healthy Vegetable Package” page, including the seasoning package including (Onion Ginger Garlic) The price of 15 kinds of vegetables is currently 186.12 yuan.
However, the “Vegetable Buns” that were delivered the following day are currently only available in Beijing. Perhaps this also illustrates the limitation of selling gas at gas stations. That is, it is convenient to implement in more mature first-tier and second-tier cities where the community is mature. County areas that are far apart and remotely located between gas stations are not easy to achieve.
The gas station’s vegetable sales business is very different from other players in the fresh food e-commerce field present.
First of all, it does not have a venue or a counter, and the options for the product are also very limited. Based on the scene of “arriving to the car,” the possibility of expanding the product category as much as possible is also very small, because the ten Within a short period of minutes, customers need to urgently choose what they need, and there is no chance of picky eyes. Second, fresh produce is a consumer product that is more frequent than refueling. Vegetables are needed daily, but fueling is not. Third, the industry’s reservations about Sinopec’s vegetable sales are mainly focused on its supply chain capabilities. We must know that in the retail world, the word “strong” is itself a threshold.
In every fresh produce industry, localization is the key to success. It is difficult for businesses to connect regional supply chains to other cities, so it is not easy to achieve rapid expansion across the country. For Sinopec, which wants to continue and expand this business to the whole country, it is still a quite realistic challenge to explore a complete fresh produce supply chain from production to warehouse in the short term.
In fact, as early as 2014, there was news that Sinopec Fuzhou gas station was testing water fresh produce sales, but apparently it has not yet become a resident category of gas stations, so it can be seen that fresh products are difficult to fully become The main force of gas stations, Sinopec will not do more “heavy.”
As for solving supply chain problems, they are more likely to choose third-party partners. Cooperation with the platform has also progressed: As of February 15, Sinopec Zhejiang Petroleum also teamed up with Hangzhou Hema Xiansheng, and citizens can purchase Hema fresh bags at the designated Sinopec gas station in Hangzhou.
Since Sinopec is hard to really start from zero and sell vegetables in order to sell vegetables, what is the logic of this special period? In fact, the most basic, this is another Sinopec and Yijie’s expansion in the non-oil product category.
Continued expansion of non-oil business
Sinopec is using the logic of gas stations to sell vegetables-it is a step forward in cultivating the habit of people buying non-oil products at gas stations.
There is no more gas station that is more keen on doing non-oil business than Sinopec. As we all know, the establishment of the Yijie Convenience Store is that Sinopec has become a major force in Sinopec’s new retail and convenience stores in order to better intervene in the non-oil business. In the Easy Fueling APP, its retail covers almost every category in the daily life, including rice cereals and oils, household appliances, digital 3C, beauty care, mother and baby, gifts and flowers.
Even overseas shopping has a special APP
Sinopec’s non-oil business has the most basic conditions for its establishment. Sinopec has nearly 30,000 gas stations across the country, of which there are more than 500 gas stations in Beijing. Other data show that Sinopec gas stations have more than 10 million passengers arriving daily. The easy-to-use convenience stores that have been spread all over the world are a natural store or front warehouse, and members are accurate passenger flow.
And more than 50% of the profits of gas stations in mature foreign markets come from non-oil products business. This is exactly the room for Sinopec’s non-oil profits to increase.
《 Beijing Commercial Daily ” has reported that some insiders believe that Sinopec’s non-oil business is more profitable in 2019: In the first half of the year, Sinopec’s revenue was 1.5 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15.3%; the net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was 31.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 24.7%. Of this, non-oil business income was 16.7 billion yuan and profit was 1.9 billion yuan. Non-oil business accounted for only 1.11% of Sinopec’s overall revenue, but contributed more than 6% of profits.
So, just half a year ago, Sinopec also launched a coffee category that looks very different from the refueling scene. Tiger Sniffing “ Fuel or coffee? “, in the second half of last year, Sinopec Yijie officially released its own coffee brand” Easy Coffee “, providing three different positioning series of coffee, but also supports” to the store + delivery “two mode. Going forward, some Beijing Yijie convenience stores also launched ready-made brunch service.
Promoting consumer products like coffee can help increase the frequency of consumption at its gas stations. It should be known that as a convenience store brand with advantages in store and passenger flow, Yijie’s single-day sales have long been equal to the industry average. The China Chain Stores Association’s “2019 China Convenience Store Development Report” shows that in 2018 The average sales exceeded 5,300 yuan, and Sinopec’s 2017 financial report showed that the average single-day sales of each store in the Yijie convenience store reached 5474 yuan that year.
However, its brand is far from the benchmark convenience store. The daily average sales of 7-11 in Beijing exceeded 20,000 yuan very early.
The choice of selling vegetables may be the same as the choice of coffee. Both are easy-to-use tools that facilitate the use of convenience stores and gas stations. After all, Sinopec, which has 80 million high- and middle-income members, can already be regarded as a natural user with high-quality users. “Private domain traffic pool”, and let this traffic pool play the biggest big data and monetization ability, maybe its ultimate purpose.
Sinopec and Yijie still have countless imaginations for the “private domain traffic pool” of gas stations, but whether the business logic can run through and how deep the business depends on the ambitions of Sinopec in the retail world How big can it be.