From last year to the beginning of this year, in the development process of China's home appliance industry, many manufacturers have complained about the most "difficult business" and "difficult times" and other market appearances. The reason behind it is that the industry is accelerating the concentration of leading companies. The home appliance circle has seen that the market share of the TOP3 and TOP5 companies in many home appliances categories has been as high as 80 percent and as low as 60 percent . Now this data has seen a significant increase in the past two years. The reason is that the multi-brand business strategy of large companies has begun to exert force.
The intuitive result brought by this is that the overall market growth rate of many categories has slowed down or even declined in the past two years, but the scale and amount of shipments of leading companies still maintain "contrarian growth." Behind this growth, it is not due to the large-scale growth of the market, but the share and space that many small and medium-sized enterprises cannot participate in the market competition and finally give up. So far, this trend has been confirmed and cannot be reversed.
In the end, this has caused a series of chain problems related to the business structure in the home appliance industry: First, the industry share is concentrated in the leading enterprises. What should a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises do and how to survive? Second, in the face of the market, users, and resources concentrating on major home appliance brands, what should many offline distributors do? Can they still cooperate with small and medium-sized brands? The third is, for such a large and diverse market as China, will there be new trends and new patterns in mature industries in other countries?
First, as the industry matures and advantageous resources are concentrated in leading enterprises, there will also be a number of small and medium-sized enterprises in any industry, especially those "small and beautiful" and "small and sophisticated" enterprises. This is also the inevitable law of the development of the industry. Large companies formulate the rules of the game, occupy the dominant position, and control the process of industrial development and reform; small companies use differentiated innovations to meet the needs of market segments and individualization, while maintaining awareness of some new technologies. The sensitivity and rapid response ability. Therefore, small enterprises in the home appliance industry have little problem in survival, but how to "live out" is still a problem.
Small and beautiful, small and refined, is a vague concept. For small and medium-sized enterprises in the home appliance industry, the key to achieving "competitiveness" is to have differentiated competitive advantages: First, they have some advantages that large enterprises do not have, such as strong market response capabilities and deep-growing capabilities in regional markets. Strong, or grab some competitive products; secondly, you can grab or deepen the market areas that some big companies are unwilling to do, and develop specialized industries that some big companies don't have the energy to do. For example, the education industry, government procurement, medicine and health and other sub-sectors, as well as special fields with a small market size, such as the marine market, the business hotel market, the apartment market, and so on.
Whether it is market segmentation, industry segmentation, or special products or special fields, small and medium home appliance companies need to be based on the local market, business and social environment, and based on their existing scale and capabilities, to explore and make trial and error. Because there is no standard answer, you can only "live yourself".
Second, for the large number of home appliance distributors, that is, "small businesses" among many populations, the number of home appliance brands that can be chosen to operate at present is declining. On the one hand, although big brands have lowered the threshold of cooperation with small businesses through new retail, cut off the intermediary agent link, and let the dealers in various township markets directly take the goods, but the big brands first sell too many merchants and second The price is completely transparent and does not make money at all; on the other hand, whether many small and medium-sized brands can still cooperate in depth and continue to operate. This is another complicated business lesson. Because of the "variables and rapid changes" in the management and development of many small and medium-sized brands, merchants can only find the most suitable brand during development, or establish a business matrix of cooperative brands, and realize cooperation from short to medium to medium to long term. Echelon.
Therefore, in the process of this round of home appliance industry concentrating to leading enterprises, the most difficult thing is the dealers in the township market. They are faced with difficulties in choosing cooperative brands in business, and unexpected accidents such as changes in cooperative brands at any time. . Therefore, we must remain sensitive to market changes and changes in the operation of home appliance brands.
Third, the heading trend of China's home appliance industry is very obvious. With the background of increasingly powerful large enterprises and merchants, it does not mean that small and medium-sized enterprises have no opportunities at all. The first is that the regional differences in the Chinese market are too large, and the cultural, economic and living habits of the east, the west, the north and the south are different, which brings a lot of opportunities for market segmentation and a lot of space; the second is that China's small and medium-sized enterprises have enough diligence, hard work, and The ability to grasp the market and user needs is sufficiently keen and insightful. Therefore, it is easy to trigger a series of business expansion and exploration, the key is to see each manufacturer's own regional breakthrough capabilities.
