Zhou Jianping, who won the award on the front foot and stepped down on the back foot, has some sense of retiring from his post. So, can his son Zhou be the new head of the family?
| By Tian Liang
| Edited by Su Su
"Men's closet" Mission Hills officially changed hands!
On the evening of November 25th, Hailan Home announced that Zhou Jianping resigned from the eighth session of the Board of Directors of the company, chairman of the board of directors and director and director of the Board of Directors Strategy Committee for personal reasons, and will not serve as any position in the company. His son Zhou Lichen took over and became the new chairman and member of the Strategy Committee.
- Zhou Lichen
Pull back the time to 1988. In that year, two major events happened in Zhou Jianping's life - starting his own business and the birth of his son, Zhou Lichen.
In the 32 years since then, Zhou Jianping has built a business empire spanning multiple industries, starting with wool spinning. At the same time, his son has grown from a Tsinghua schoolboy to a rising star in the business world. It can be said that this "old and new handover" is not unexpected.
However, Mission Hills has not yet solved the problem of high inventory for many years, and the old man can walk in style, but the young man can really stand up to it.
Woolen giant
In the 1980s, when the tide of reform and opening up, many people began to go to sea to do business, Zhou Jianping also moved.
In 1988, at the age of 28, he took 300,000 yuan in savings, with 18 workers, contracted the collective enterprise Jiangyin Third Woolen Mill in Xinqiao Town, Jiangyin City, Jiangsu Province.
Jiangyin is a county-level city belonging to Wuxi, and after 2002, it has been ranked among the top four of China's top 100 counties for many years with Suzhou's Kunshan, Zhangjiagang, and Changshu, known as the "Four Little Dragons of Jiangsu". Jiangyin's private economy is well-developed, where Zhou Jianping also has a keen sense of business.
In 1991, the woolen mill of the coarse spinning business is hot, but Zhou Jianping that with the improvement of people's living standards, the pursuit of clothing fabrics will be higher and higher, the worsted market will develop rapidly. So, he went around to raise money and invested 10 million yuan to start doing worsted.
3 years later, the third woolen mill was renamed Sanmao Group (the predecessor of Hailan Group), and in 1997, the annual sales of Sanmao Group exceeded 1 billion RMB, making it the second largest woolen group in China.
- Zhou Jianping
After that, under the leadership of Zhou Jianping, Sanmao Group also took the lead in overcoming a number of technical problems in wool spinning, formed the industrialization of scientific and technological achievements, and ranked among the world's top ten wool spinners, and was identified by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China as China's only national key high-tech enterprise in the wool spinning industry, and created China's "Fabric Silicon Valley" in China.
Can be unknown workshop type wool spinning factory quickly developed into a national mega wool spinning enterprise group, Zhou Jianping's ability is beyond doubt.
He was awarded the "Top Ten Chinese Township Enterprises News", "National Outstanding Young Entrepreneurs", "National Advanced Individual in Professional Ethics Construction" and other honorary titles, has been awarded the National Award for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological Progress three times, and has been awarded the National Award for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological Progress three times. In 2000, he became the fourth "China Youth May Fourth Medal" winner, only 12 people were awarded this honor.
- Zhou Jianping was honored with the Fourth "Chinese Youth May Fourth Medal".
After a certain stage of development in the textile industry, Sanmao Group started to develop downstream apparel industry, which was the second important turn of the Group. 2001, Sanmao Group was renamed as Hailan Group, which means "to create a magnificent business with the vastness of the sea and the sky".
In 2002, Zhou went to Japan to study, and Uniqlo caught his attention for its unique and differentiated sales model from the domestic market. Zhou Jianping summarized Uniqlo's model as three features: clothing by gender, functional neatly partitioned, like a supermarket, convenient and direct; the same style of clothing, providing a variety of sizes, colors and versions to choose from, to fully meet the needs of the shopping; customers to shop on their own without the guide to guide, try on the room is sufficient.
In the same year of his trip to Japan, Zhou Jianping opened the first men's clothing self-service supermarket in Nanjing, Hailan Home, which was clearly positioned as a "man's closet", with a sales model that referenced Uniqlo, attracting a lot of customers and quickly opening up the market. In 2014, Hailan Home successfully landed in the capital market by borrowing the shell of Kainuo Technology.
Hailan Home had 655 stores in 2009, and grew to 5,598 stores in 2019, with an average of 494 stores opened each year; its revenue rose from 1.38 billion yuan in 2009 to 21.97 billion yuan in 2019, a 15-fold increase in 10 years, and it became the second Chinese apparel company with more than 20 billion yuan in revenue after Anta.
In August 2019, the 2019 China's Richest 2,000 Individuals and Families list, led by the China Investment Bank Club, showed that Zhou Jianping topped the domestic apparel retail industry with a wealth of 40 billion yuan.
Horses for friends
In addition to "wool spinning giant", Zhou Jianping's other label is "horse lover". One of his most well-known hobbies is horse breeding.
In 2007, he traveled to Lijiang, Yunnan Province, and galloped his horse on the grass, feeling that "it was fun to run around". In 2010, Zhou Jianping invested 1.6 billion yuan to build the Hailan International Equestrian Club.
He collected hundreds of famous horses from dozens of countries, such as the "noble pet" British Shetland ponies, "equestrian ballet" Spanish Andalusian horses, "talented dancers" Dutch Friesian horses, and "talented dancers". "Dutch Friesian horse," "invincible" German Hanoverian horse, as well as three sweat blood BMW from Asia.
Lao Zhou, who won awards for his wool-spinning skills back then, also has top-notch horse-raising skills. Hailan International Equestrian Club took four Guinness records in 2014: the club with the largest collection of horse breeds in the world; the world's largest dressage; the most mounts and dismounts in 30 seconds; and the most consecutive obstacle crossings in the world in a minute by a single person driving four horses.
- Zhou Jianping's Hailan International Equestrian Club has taken a number of Guinness World Records.
"Equestrianism is the culture of Hailan, and we use horses to meet friends and equestrianism as a platform to make friends with the whole world." Zhou Jianping said. He also built a horse culture museum with an area of more than 30,000 square meters, where guests come and go, and Jack Ma and Ma Huateng are his guests.
Businessmen have a social circle, naturally talk about business. Ma Yun and Zhou Jianping "horse to meet friends" 15 days later, Tmall and Mission Hills House officially signed a new retail strategic cooperation.
- Tmall and Hailan Home reached a cooperation, the picture shows the President of Hailan Group, Zhou Lichen (third from the left), the Chairman of the Hailan Group, Zhou Jianping (fourth from the left), CEO of Alibaba, Zhang Yong (fourth from the right), and President of the Tmall Apparel Business Group, Liu Xiuyun (third from the right), in the group photo.
In addition to being a horse breeder, Zhou Jianping is also a "power freak".
Zhou Jianping is a deputy to the 10th National People's Congress and a member of the 11th, 12th and 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
On the closing day of the National People's Congress and the State Council in 2015, the central government and the State Council issued the Opinions on Further Deepening the Reform of the Electricity System (China Development [2015] No. 9), announcing that it will break the monopoly of the grid companies and open up distribution and sale of electricity in an orderly manner to social capital. capital to open up the power distribution and sale business in an orderly manner." Zhou Jianping quickly smelled the flavor of profit.
In March 2016, Jiangyin Donghai Electric Power Engineering Co., Ltd. was changed to "Jiangsu Hailan Electric Power Co.
In just three years, Hailan Group has become a cross-border champion. Zhou Jianping has introduced himself that the subsidiary Hailan Power ranked first in Jiangsu Province in power sales with a total contracted power of 23.4 billion kilowatt hours in 2018.
Inventory problems
Zhou Jianping in a number of areas to expand the territory, however, their own main business is facing problems.
In recent years, there has been a popular topic in the business world: which is the better mode of operation, asset-light or asset-heavy? Zhou Jianping chose light assets.
But after outsourcing the production process, not only did Hailan's own baggage become lighter, but also the 300 small and medium-sized garment companies that had equipment and workers but no market were revitalized. The entrepreneur, who was born in the countryside, laughed and said that he was "a man of the first industry, doing things of the second industry, earning money of the third industry".
In the downstream, Zhou Jianping also encouraged social capital to join Mission Hills. Franchisees pay money to open the store, bear the operating costs, but do not need to participate in the operation, store management entrusted to Mission Hills House fully responsible for. At the same time, the goods in the franchised stores are not owned by the franchisee, but commissioned by HML to sell on behalf of the franchisee. Therefore, the franchisee does not need to bear the risk of stock stagnation.
In this way, the scale of Hailan Home's inventory is inevitably higher than that of its peers. 2015-2019, the book value of Hailan Home's ending inventory was 9.58 billion, 8.63 billion, 8.49 billion, 9.47 billion and 9.044 billion yuan, respectively; the proportion of inventory to revenue was 60.5%, 50.8%, 46.7%, 49.6% and 41.2%, which is much higher than that of other companies in the same industry.
From 2016 onwards, the growth rate of both revenue and net profit of Hailan House began to show a significant downward trend. Including a number of brands such as women's clothing, the overall single-store revenue of Hailan Home Company slipped from 3.97 million yuan in 2015 to 3.03 million yuan in 2019. The single-store revenue of the single brand of Hellas House, on the other hand, declined from 3.7 million yuan in 2015 to 3.11 million yuan in 2019.
On April 19, 2019, at the annual shareholders' meeting of Hellas House, minority shareholders questioned the size of the company's inventory and business model. Zhou Jianping, who has been an industry leader for decades, where to listen, he disliked: "If you are level enough, it is you who will be the chairman." "If the revenue is not more than Hailan, there is no qualification to question us, no one is allowed to question the inventory problem of Hailan!"
In 2020, when revenue and net profit fell sharply, Hailan Home's stores at the end of the third quarter increased by only one to 7,255 compared to the end of 2019. Hailan home main brand franchise stores in this year for the first time in the number of stores decline, the first three quarters of the net closure of 137 stores. The industry believes that the way Hailan Home relies on franchises to keep expanding has appeared to be a ceiling.
Father and son
November 24, 2020 National Model Worker and Advanced Worker Commendation Conference was held in Beijing, Zhou Jianping was named National Model Worker. The next day, Zhou Jianping officially handed over the burden of Hailan House to his son.
The old man, who won the award on the front foot and left the post on the back foot, has a tendency to retire after a few years of hard work. So, can Zhou hold on?
When it comes to Mission Hills, a lot of people immediately think of the tap-dancing Indian Xiaotian, who said, "I shop at Mission Hills twice a year". Later on, the Indian Xiaotian was replaced by Du Chun. However, many people believe that this is just a change of soup but not a change of medicine, a formal dress Du Chun continue to dance hard, the routine has not changed. Many consumers have labeled Hailan House as "earth" and "middle-aged aesthetics".
In 2012, after graduating from Tsinghua University and working in an investment institution for a period of time, Zhou Lichen returned to Hailan Group and successively took over the advertising department, information center and other departments. Under his leadership, Hailan sponsored a series of popular variety shows such as "Run for it Brothers" and "The Strongest Brain", and then changed its spokesperson to Lin Renewal, who is "the dream of 900 million girls". Last month, Hailan Home was once again pleased to mention a new spokesman - Jay Chou.
Since this year, Hailan Home has carried out a digital transformation of all its brands, and followed the trend of live broadcasting, Zhou Lichen visited the live broadcasting room to carry out live broadcasting with goods. I don't know if it is because of this new change that Zhou Jianping has accelerated the passing of the baton to his son.
- Zhou Lichen (center) participated in the entertainment program
In the first three quarters of this year, Hailan House's online sales growth reached 16.70%, 40.22% and 111.27% respectively. However, as of the end of the third quarter, Hailan Home's online channel still only accounted for 11.59% of total revenue, a large gap with the offline system.
On November 25th, at the inaugural meeting of the new board of directors of Hailan Home, Zhou Jianping, who has always been strong, said with tears in his eyes, "I believe, and I firmly believe, that Zhou Lichen will not disgrace his father, and he will not disgrace his folks." Only, "create two generations" can realize the old father's expectations, but also need time to verify.