Not long ago, Womai.com, a subsidiary of COFCO, was preparing to go public in Hong Kong and had uploaded preliminary prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Its prospectus showed that Womai.com had a cumulative loss of RMB 3.335 billion and a cumulative revenue of RMB 6.428 billion in the past three and a half years. COFCO Womai.com has raised a total of more than 2 billion yuan in previous financing.
Also not long ago, Yiguo Fresh completed a US$300 million Series D financing, and combined with the previous rounds, the total financing totaled more than 7 billion yuan.
Today's fresh food e-commerce is inseparable from these huge numbers and seems to have become a game that has become a giant, which makes people sigh. Did you think that fresh food e-commerce just appeared ten years ago, and you can form an entrepreneurial team for more than 100,000 yuan, carry a SLR to the countryside, and open a super buyer Taobao store alone. At that time, it was full of passion for entrepreneurship, enthusiasm for reshaping food safety, and romantic fantasy of beautiful countryside.
An early batch of fresh food e-commerce appeared in 2005-2008 (Yiguo 2005, Helekang 2008, Tuotuo Workshop 2008), and the author was fortunate to be a member of one of the entrepreneurial teams.
Most entrepreneurs who were involved in fresh food e-commerce/agricultural product e-commerce in the early days had similar reasons for entering the industry, and were forced by the food safety conditions at that time. That was a period when food safety issues began to occur frequently, including melamine, clenbuterol, Sudan red, toxic milk powder, heavy metals exceeding the standard, antibiotics exceeding the standard, etc. During that period, we first graduated from school and re-learned the periodic table of elements. It was also during that period when the trend of urbanization began, and many urban white-collar workers went to the countryside to work as farmers and start businesses, which could escape the sub-healthy life in the city and produce safe agricultural products. In this way, there is production and sales. With the help of the Internet, fresh food e-commerce /agricultural product e-commerce began to develop.
Every year we can see news about agricultural products being unsalable. The cabbage that costs a few cents per pound is rotten in the fields, but the people in the city complain about the soaring price of vegetables. Why? A hateful middleman! All the money was earned by layers of middlemen. So why not use e-commerce to replace traditional channels? So a group of entrepreneurs who subverted the vegetable market were on the road to entrepreneurship.
Youcai.com was one of the early e-commerce companies that entered the mass vegetables. The online vegetable market sounds very good. Once it is operated, it will be killed by cabbage every minute. The food that cannot be sold today cannot be sold the next day, and the loss is too great. A customer's order contains eggs, cucumbers and frozen ribs. It seems to be one order, but in fact it can't save any of the three orders, packaging and shipping costs.
Youcai.com fell down quickly. Vegetables are minefields of e-commerce, and it is true that they are the little farmer girl and the young Caijun who fell down later. Today, only Shixing Fresh and I-Cook are still struggling in the mass vegetable e-commerce market, and these two companies are still not profitable.
Some small fresh food e-commerce teams have focused on imported standardized products. When I was doing fresh food e-commerce , I once had a competitor that was a small team of husband-and-wife stores, which mainly engaged in imported milk e-commerce. Taobao is one of the main sales platforms for various imported milk e-commerce companies. At that time, several popular imported milk ranked high, and in addition to our company, the small team of that husband-and-wife store was often ranked in the top three. Because their team is small, their operating costs are low, and they only make a few hot products, their operational efficiency is also high. They do not use an ERP system. One notepad is enough. They rely on low prices to drive volume. As long as they are willing to endure hardships, they still have a lot of money. Taobao is one of the main sales platforms for various imported milk e-commerce companies. At that time, several popular imported milk ranked high, and in addition to our company, the small team of that husband-and-wife store was often ranked in the top three. Because their team is small, their operating costs are low, and they only make a few hot products, their operational efficiency is also high. They do not use an ERP system. One notepad is enough. They rely on low prices to drive volume. As long as they are willing to endure hardships, they still have a lot of money.
Today, the overall scale of the fresh food e-commerce market has reached 140 billion, compared with only tens of millions 10 years ago and only 3.6 billion in five years. Although the scale is large, there are only a few large merchants left in the market, and the hot-selling agricultural products of e-commerce are mainly concentrated in imported fruits, imported beef and mutton and imported seafood, and the proportion of domestic fresh agricultural products is not high. This may be the rationality of the stage. When we think back to the beginning of the fresh food e-commerce business, have the food safety problem we want to solve? Have you tasted the deliciousness of my hometown? Is it true that farmland is from the dining table? "Reshape the intimate relationship between people and food" may be the most romantic summary of the original intention of starting a fresh food e-commerce business. Early entrepreneurs fell down or transformed, and their original passion retreated. Those who have survived successfully and new entrepreneurs, I wonder if they will still think of this flag.
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