Produced | Tiger Sniff Business Group

Author | Liu Ran

Title map | IC photo

After announcing strategic cooperation with Kuaishou, JD.com took out the news of investing in Gome-on the evening of May 28, JD.com announced its strategic investment in Gome Retail, subscribing to Gome Retail for overseas sales of USD 100 million Convertible bonds.

In fact, in April of this year, Pinduoduo also announced the subscription of US $ 200 million of convertible bonds issued by Gome Retail, and the two reached in-depth strategic cooperation. In mainstream analysis, Tencent is behind JD.com and Pinduoduo, and Suning still competes with Gome. It is well known that Suning is Ali’s “good friend.”

The camp division continues- Suning Logistics and Hungry Mo have also reached a strategic cooperation in early May of this year. Suning Logistics will provide nationwide material distribution services for Hungry Mo.

The battle between the e-commerce market and the sinking market has become very fierce. So far, there has been a clear distinction between “opponents” and “friends”.

Why is JD + Gome?

In fact, just two months ago, Gome opened the cooperation between the two parties by opening a flagship store in JD. This strategic cooperation is also called “further deepening” of the cooperation by both parties. According to the agreement: the two parties will be based on The advantages of each other’s online and offline, to achieve more efficient coordination and integration of the commodity supply chain, and to achieve resource sharing in logistics distribution and installation services, as well as cooperation in the development of a full range of business including financial services.

JD.com ’s primary goal when investing in Gome just is to continue to promote the layout of its original offline home appliances.

In addition to investing in five-star appliances, Dixintong, Lenovo Laiku, etc., JD.com has been opening offline franchise stores in various categories in recent years, such as JD home appliance stores, JD digital stores, JD convenience stores, JD mothers and infants, JD wine Various offline formats such as the world.

From 2015 to 2017, JD.com ’s mother and baby, JD.com home appliances, and millions of convenience stores are scheduled to be launched year by year, and will be launched in 2019Open Jingdong Digital Store. Among them, compared with special categories and store forms such as mothers and infants and convenience stores, the most thorough sinking of all offline formats is JD.com.

Tiger Sniff was written in “ Jingdong” sinking “, home appliance 3C It is the dominant category of JD.com, and it also has the characteristics of being more prone to sinking. Therefore, it has become the focus of JD.com’s layout in the sinking market and offline. As of the end of June last year, the number of JD appliance stores has exceeded 10,000 (more than 12,000) , covering 25,000 townships and 60 nationwide More than ten thousand administrative villages.

For Gome, the biggest role of entering JD.com is obviously to fill the gap in the online traffic end, so as not to lose in the next new retail competition.

Suning has been standing opposite Gome. In 2019, Gome ’s total retail revenue was 136.11 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of 7.57%, and a net loss of nearly 2.6 billion yuan. On the other side, Suning Tesco, supported by Alibaba, had an annual operating income of 269.229 billion yuan in 2019. Net profit attributable to mother was 9.843 billion yuan. Obviously, in a new retail battle that has begun to pursue a common online and offline competition, it is no longer wise for the country to continue to fight alone.

People in the industry told Tiger Sniff that in the cooperation between Pinduoduo and Gome, Pinduoduo ’s early focus on low-cost products and social fission has already gained a large number of users, and its latest active buyers have now exceeded 600 million people, But the home appliance category is not a competitive category, and Gome is just able to complement this category, helping it enter the mid-to-high-end market.

Pinduoduo is able to provide support to Gome in the dimensions of traffic, marketing, data, etc., helping it to quickly open online traffic and expand its user base and sales scale. In addition, Gome’s Anxun Logistics, Gome Butler and other services can also provide logistics and after-sales services that Pinduoduo lacks.

But for the cooperation between JD and Gome, the situation is slightly different. You need to know that both parties have a strong accumulation in the field of home appliances, so the cooperation between the two is actually based on their original procurement advantages and forms China. The largest purchase scale of home appliances consolidates the advantages of the supply chain.

“Although the supply chains of JD.com and Gome are all in 3C of home appliances, they actually have their own emphasis, each with its own strong category and brand, and its own price.Intervals, which can complement each other after grouping. Of course, in addition to this, JD’s online traffic and Gome’s offline channels can also form a synergy. “The person said.

It can be said that under such a “holding group”, the signals of the escalation of the battle between the camps have been sent.

The enemy ’s enemy is a friend

On August 11, 2015, Alibaba and Suning Yunshang announced a strategic cooperation: Alibaba Group participated in Suning Yunshang ’s non-public offering of shares at RMB 28.3 billion, becoming Suning Yunshang ’s second largest shareholder, and At the same time, Suning Yunshang will subscribe for no more than 27.8 million Alibaba new shares for 14 billion yuan.

At that time, Zhang Jindong (Chairman of Suning Yunshang) mentioned in an internal email that the two parties will maintain their independent operations on the basis of , Integrate all-round resources of collaborative commodities, platforms, logistics, services and technology, and jointly explore the road of O2O mode of online and offline integration.

This kind of cooperation was once thought to form a “encirclement and suppression” trend for JD.com. This scene is reproduced now-

On the 25th of this month, the first large-scale shopping festival “618” after the epidemic opened in a very lively smell of gunpowder. Ali, Suning, and JD.com have announced their preferential strategies, among which Ali has pointed directly to the so-called home position of “618”; Suning is directly named JD. It announced the launch of the “J-10%” money-saving plan and the direct “stub price” head. Some products are “at least 10% lower” than JD.com, saying that they will “break down the so-called super billion subsidies”.

The directionality of Ali and Suning is already very strong, and JD.com ’s choice to cooperate with its former opponents is one of the responses to the current competitive landscape.

However, the cooperation between Ali and Suning is more reflected in Suning ’s flagship store on Tmall, and in the “deeper” cooperation above the flagship store, the relationship between Jingdong and Gome can ” “Mitigation”, which step to develop, requires follow-up observation. Tiger Sniff asked a JD home appliance franchisee about this cooperation, and the response was: At present, it has not received any news of cooperation with the local Gome store at the store level.

Another analysis said that behind JD.com and Pinduoduo are actually Tencent, and now that they are in succession with Gome, Tencent ’s efforts may be indispensable. After all, a lot of capital injection in April is still in sight, and the “value” of the cooperation is also between JD.com and Gome.The time limit of the convertible bond is three years, the coupon rate is 5%, and the initial conversion price is 1.215 Hong Kong dollars per share. If all the final conversion rights are exercised, Pinduoduo will be allocated up to 1.28 billion Gome shares, accounting for approximately 5.62% of Gome ’s expanded share capital.

None of them is small.

At present, Ali wants to guarantee Suning’s layout in the sinking market, especially the home appliance market. Although both Ali and Suning are big in their fields, the competition in the sinking market has not yet reached the final moment. The understanding of Pinduoduo, Gome and JD Logistics in the sinking market can not only be ignored, but also an extremely important one.

In a way, opposite to Ali and Suning, the old and new rivals such as Jingdong, Pinduoduo and Gome have stood on the united front.

In fact, at the moment when Gome moves frequently, it also happens to have the background of Huang Guangyu entering the countdown from prison Until February 16) . Although he is not in the rivers and lakes, Gome always mentions Huang Guangyu every time he plays a strategic move. From the perspective of Huang Guangyu’s influence and voice in Gome and the home appliance industry, such a pattern may lay the foundation for its coming out in the future.

However, regarding the pattern and camp theory, the above-mentioned industry insiders said that this statement is actually “narrow”. It said that the purpose of this strategic financing was to serve Gome ’s strategic transformation, “Gome thought very clearly from the beginning that it can find partners on the flow side and the supply chain side to play strategic value, and there is no such thing as an opponent. The meaning of making friends. “

But in any case, the situation of home appliances is about to start again soon.