Since Pusi Chemical Company occupied a monopoly position in the agricultural chemicals market, it has gradually returned to its original business and focused on continuing to cultivate industrial chemicals.
In the field of industrial chemicals, the market share is actually relatively fixed. Except for a few new chemicals with particularly excellent performance, which lead to market replacement, in other parts, it is very difficult to open up the market.
Pusi Chemical Company basically adopts two approaches in the high-end field. One is to provide customers with higher-purity high-end chemicals, and the other is to provide better alternative new chemicals.
With these two methods, they have gradually eroded the market share of other chemical giants in the field of high-end chemicals. Currently, their high-end chemicals account for more than 60% of the entire high-end chemicals market share.
But in the field of mid- to low-end industrial chemicals, we are in a dilemma. We must either provide higher-quality chemicals or use price wars. Anyway, these are the two methods.
The former has invaded the high-end industrial chemical market on a large scale, especially the high-end chemical market replaced by new products, causing other chemical companies to have to lower the prices of their high-end products to lock in the mid-to-low-end market.
In order to compete for the market, Pusi Chemical Company has to adopt similar methods, and mutual price reductions naturally become inevitable. Therefore, in the field of mid-to-low-end chemicals, profit margins are getting lower and lower.
This makes Pusi Chemical, which has already monopolized the field of agricultural chemicals and enjoyed high profits, a bit uncomfortable because they have not taken such bloody methods to gain market share for a long time.
In order to break the deadlock, they are actively developing new chemical products on the one hand, hoping to develop products that are better than the current chemicals, so as to use technological advantages to stand out and gain a competitive advantage.
On the other hand, they hope to find new markets, rather than blindly compete with others for the market. Once they find a new market, they can basically monopolize the entire market.
Pusi Chemical Company's technical strength is still very strong, but to say it is far superior to its peers is a bit exaggerated. At least compared to the competitive advantages of Cornerstone Materials Company, there is still a big gap.
Because what Zhao Yi originally provided to Cornerstone Materials was a complete set of new materials theory, and he also built a material analysis system for them. The two complemented each other, giving Cornerstone Materials an absolute advantage in the research and development of new materials.
However, at Pusi Chemical Company, Zhao Yiyi's technologies were relatively independent at the beginning and did not form a relatively complete theoretical basis for the system. If Pusi Chemical Company wanted to develop new chemicals, it still used the same old methods.
The only thing that is ahead of other chemical giants is their production technology. Generally, the production of chemicals is a chemical reaction process, and Pusi Chemical Company uses microbial production methods in many fields.
This is also the reason why the chemicals provided by Pusi Chemical Company have higher purity and greater cost-effectiveness. Compared with traditional chemical production methods, microbial production methods are definitely low-carbon and environmentally friendly.
Zhao Yi has no strong intention to change the current status of chemicals, because the current types of chemicals are enough to meet the needs of most industries for chemicals.
And his requirements for Pusi Chemical Company are not that high. As long as they can meet the needs of his companies and domestic industry and agriculture for chemicals, it is actually very open to question whether they will become a global chemical giant.
However, Duan Jianhong, who has been on the bench for many years, does not think so. Since they have tasted the sweetness of the agricultural chemicals field, they have become more and more eager to monopolize the business.
In fact, in the field of commonly used chemicals, it is basically completely market-oriented, and profits are actually very slim. It is actually very difficult to make big money.
Therefore, after occupying a certain market share in the industrial chemicals market, Pusi Chemical Company has no plans to continue to expand. The current market structure is actually basically stable.
Now their main energy is still used to discover new markets, and at the same time make more investments in the field of polymer chemicals, basically leaving the domestic basic chemical raw material production market to China Chemical Group.
Although the profits of basic chemicals are low, if the market size is large, you can still rely on the advantages of scale and generally obtain good profits.
On the one hand, Pusi Chemical Company did this to sell to the government to save face; on the other hand, it hoped to concentrate resources and rely on its greater scale advantage to further reduce the cost of basic chemical raw materials.
Giving up this market to China National Chemical Group will allow China National Chemical Group to rapidly expand its scale and compete with international basic chemical manufacturers in the field of basic chemicals by relying on its scale advantage.
Of course, the reason why Pulse Chemical Company is confident in handing over this piece to Sinochem Group is mainly because they are state-owned enterprises. Compared with private enterprises, state-owned enterprises will consider the stability of domestic industrial development more and will not increase prices arbitrarily for no reason.
You must know that Pusi Chemical Company's high-end chemicals also require these basic chemical raw materials to be synthesized step by step. The increase in the price of basic chemicals will naturally compress their profit margins and lead to a decrease in competitiveness.
Not to mention, they actually found a new chemical market with a large market space last year, which is flame retardant chemicals. This is an area that Zhao Yidu has not considered much.
From May 6 to June 2 last year, a major forest fire broke out in my country's Daxingan Mountains. The forest fire burned for 28 days, with the burned area ranging from 1.2 million to 1.3 million hectares, of which forestland accounted for 70%.
The conventional method of extinguishing fires is to use a large amount of water to extinguish fires. However, this method is okay for small fires, but it is actually very limited for large fires.
For large fires, isolation is mainly used to prevent the fire from continuing to spread. For excessive fires, one can only let nature take its course. This is the power of nature, and it is difficult for humans to compete.
When Pusi Chemical Company saw this news, it naturally thought of the field of flame retardant chemicals. In this era, flame retardant chemicals have just entered the development track and are not very prosperous.
More importantly, chemicals with flame retardant effects basically have environmental pollution problems to a greater or lesser extent. Although they can be flame retardant, they will also bring greater environmental pressure.
In fact, Pusi Chemical Company has had products with flame retardant effects before. For example, the plastic products produced by Huaxia International Petrochemical Company have added a large amount of flame retardants, and the amount is second only to plasticizers.
However, this concept was not made clear at the time. The Daxinganling fire made Pusi Chemical Company realize that the flame retardant chemicals market will be a huge market, and there are currently not many companies entering this market.
However, it is not a matter of time to develop such chemical products. It must have a very obvious flame retardant effect without causing harm to the environment. You can imagine the difficulty.
However, once it is developed, the market size is very considerable. More than 200,000 large and small forest fires occur around the world every year, and there are countless other fires. The economic losses caused by fires every year are very huge.
Moreover, its own companies also have very large demands. The forest area transformed by the company Fluclight Environment in three deserts in the northwest reaches nearly 80,000 square kilometers. Once a fire breaks out, the losses will be very large.
Moreover, it is very difficult to plant trees in this place, and the surrounding water sources are relatively scarce. Once a big fire breaks out, it is basically impossible to put out the fire. You can only rely on creating isolation zones to prevent the fire from spreading.
Of course, the most ideal situation is to nip the fire in the bud, so in the future, a large number of smoke and temperature sensors and smart cameras will be installed in these forest areas. Once a fire occurs, it can be informed in a short time to prevent a small fire from turning into a big fire.
Since Pusi Chemical Company has set its next goal in this field, Zhao Yi also supports it. As for when they will develop it, he does not force it and will let them research it on their own for the time being.
Anyway, given their current industrial scale, there is no shortage of funds to invest in research and development. In addition, they have been recruiting chemical talents from all over the world in recent years, and the talent team has been built quite well.
In the past year, Shangtong Trading Company, in addition to its traditional retail business, logistics business, and daily product manufacturing business, has focused its main energy on the global expansion of its e-commerce platform.
Their B2B platform is not difficult to build as the number of companies associated with them is very large and their brother companies have high status in their respective fields.
It only needs to be used among brother companies, and other companies will follow suit unconsciously. As long as they use it, they will find it much simpler and more convenient than the traditional procurement process, and they can also save a lot of procurement costs and Promotional costs.
Therefore, in just over a year, their B2B has become the world's largest B2B e-commerce platform, connecting almost all companies in the world, allowing companies to have a good channel for procurement and sales.
The profit sources of the B2B e-commerce platform in the 1.0 era mainly come from three aspects: paid membership fees, transaction commissions, and advertising revenue.
As a commercial and trading company with richer resources, it is natural that it is not limited to the above ways of making money. More of their profit sources are in value-added services, such as logistics, warehousing, finance, processing and offline communication and other activities.
In fact, the annual income of the first three areas is not much. In the past year, their income in the above three areas was less than 10 billion yuan. This is already a pretty good situation, and there will not be a significant increase in the future. .
Therefore, if you want to continue to develop in the B2B e-commerce field, you must focus more on value-added services and provide member companies with a full range of transaction services around the B2B e-commerce platform.
It's just that this area has just been developed. Currently, it provides members with value-added services including logistics, warehousing, offline business exchanges, etc., but other services such as finance have not yet started.
Previously, Shangtong Trading Company had strong capabilities in the field of domestic logistics and warehousing, and had business relationships with many companies in this area. In addition, it had its own commercial service business, making it even more convenient.
Now they are just expanding their domestic business and making a global layout. Anyway, their other e-commerce platforms also need global logistics and warehousing support, but they have added global business services.
Zhao Yi agrees with this development idea, but the current B2B e-commerce platform is considered a comprehensive platform, with all types of companies included, which makes it a bit confusing.
Therefore, Zhao Yi suggested to Jia Siqi at the meeting that she should establish an industry directory and establish numerous vertical B2B platforms based on the industry directory. This would allow peer companies to gather more closely, and the success rate and efficiency of dealmaking would be higher.
If other companies do this, it will definitely not work, because it will consume a lot of energy to maintain. In the past, many vertical websites only focused on a certain field.
However, Shangtong Trading Company itself is very rich in resources and large enough. In addition, its technical strength is not weak at all. It has a good foundation in terms of online operation capabilities and offline service capabilities.
But these are just the basics. If you want to do it well, you need to make greater efforts. As a leader in the field of commercial services, he believes that Shangtong Trading Company can do this well.
The business complexity currently involved in Shangtong Trading Company is already the most complex in the world. Their traditional retail channel business alone is not comparable to B2B e-commerce platforms, let alone other businesses.
It is precisely because of this that he made this suggestion. If it is an ordinary enterprise, it would be great to be able to build a comprehensive B2B e-commerce platform. If it wants to involve all aspects of the vertical B2B e-commerce field, it may not have achieved results yet. Fell first.
At present, the total revenue of their B2B e-commerce platform is more than 20 billion yuan. It is already good to have such achievements just after it was founded, so there is no need to be too demanding.
Last year, their focus was still on the B2C e-commerce platform. As of now, the number of global users of their B2C e-commerce platform has reached 500 million. This data is already very scary in this era.
The reason why it has reached this point in just a few months is mainly because of smartphones. In the early stage, it relied on subsidizing smartphones. The online purchase price was cheaper than offline, and it gained the first wave of users.
In the later period, it was mainly because their B2C e-commerce platform software was pre-installed on smartphones. Anyone who purchased a smartphone later became their user, and zombie users were rare.
Last year, the three smartphone companies shipped more than 260 million smartphones. This alone brought about 250 million active users to their B2C e-commerce platforms.
With so many users, there will be a group effect. When people around you use this e-commerce platform to purchase goods very conveniently, other people will also be interested in trying it.
In addition, Shangtong Trading Company has established an efficient logistics network and warehousing system around the world. Most of the products can be delivered to users the next day. Only products that are not available in local warehousing bases will take longer to arrive.
Coupled with the large-scale use of drones, the cost of the last mile has been greatly reduced, and the logistics costs borne by users have naturally been greatly reduced. The overall cost of online shopping for users is almost the same as offline.
In fact, online prices can be lower than offline, because online does not require physical store costs. Just out of various considerations, Shangtong Trading Company has made the overall online shopping cost almost the same as offline shopping prices. s level.
Although it will be cheaper, it will not be too cheap, so after their B2C e-commerce platform was launched, they did not encounter strong resistance from offline sales channels.
The B2C e-commerce platform is very suitable for consumers who don’t like shopping. At the same time, the online platform allows users to select more products in one place and can meet the diversified needs of users, which is incomparable to offline sales channels.
In terms of overall profits, online platforms are higher than offline platforms because they do not require high-cost rent, water and electricity, and at the same time the number of employed workers is much smaller, so the profit margin is much higher than offline.
And because the platform is large enough, it has greater bargaining rights in cooperation with enterprises. Although it will not squeeze the profits of enterprises, under reasonable circumstances, enterprises will generally provide some profit-making measures.
In particular, they added a 3D scanning data modeling system to their e-commerce platform, which brings a very high user experience to consumers, at least playing a huge role in the clothing, shoes and hats business.
The biggest fear when buying clothes online is that they don't fit, and the second is that the sample is wrong. The former uses 3D scanning data modeling technology to allow users to buy clothes without worrying about size.
There is no problem with the latter, because this is a B2C website, and the quality control of goods is not comparable to that of C2C e-commerce platforms.
Although it is not said that every product has undergone strict inspection, at least every batch of products and the B2C e-commerce platform have gone through strict inspection, and the physical product and the website data absolutely match.
In the past few months, each user purchased an average of about 500 yuan of goods on the B2C e-commerce platform, contributing 250 billion yuan in sales to Shangtong Trading Company's B2C e-commerce platform.
At present, the gross profit of their B2C e-commerce platform is about 30%, and the net profit margin is about 18%. This is already quite good data, at least higher than the overall profit margin of Shangtong Trading Company's offline retail channels.
Of course, the achievement of such results not only relies on reductions in logistics, warehousing, and personnel costs, but also relies on efficient cooperation across the entire industry chain to achieve such results.
If you want to make money as a B2C e-commerce platform, you must increase the turnover rate of goods, reduce inventory of goods, improve capital utilization, etc., which were previously inseparable from the digital information processing systems of universities.
In this regard, Shangtong Trading Company is precisely the field with the most advantages. Their offline business has widely used such a system. It only needs to be modified to make online business more efficient than offline business.
As the maturity of artificial intelligence technology becomes higher and higher, the companies under his control are becoming more and more widely used, and Shangtong Trading Company has naturally not let go of this area.
Continuing with big data and artificial intelligence technology, whether it is product recommendation, display, dynamic data management, purchase and other data, it has basically been automated and processed, requiring very little manual processing.
In addition, in the field of after-sales service, the introduction of the intelligent customer service system of Lingchen Technology Company has greatly reduced the cost of after-sales service. Moreover, user satisfaction is very high and they have a strong willingness to purchase again.
Although they are currently performing very well and their profit margins are quite high, taking into account previous investment, they are still in a state of loss overall. It may take more than 2 years to recover the initial investment.
Currently, in order to cooperate with the development of global business, Shangtong Trading Company has spent 100 billion yuan on investment in logistics, warehousing, automation equipment, distribution systems, etc. The current business carrying capacity can reach a scale of trillions of yuan.
Judging from the current development situation, it may be necessary to expand the existing support system starting this year to meet the needs of future business development.
According to Jia Siqi’s report, the annual sales of global B2C e-commerce platforms are likely to exceed the 1 trillion yuan mark this year. Therefore, it is necessary to continue to invest in software and hardware facilities this year, and it is likely that all profits from last year will be used.
As business continues to increase, these investments will not stop in the future, but Zhao Yi hopes that Shangtong Trading Company will continue to strengthen data link management and construction to tap more profit margins.
If Shangtong Trading Company's retail reach could be directly reached before, it was domestic and Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Other regions mainly adopted the method of investing in shares.
The e-commerce platform has broken the original retail pattern and completely spread their tentacles all over the world. This is something that Shangtong Trading Company wanted to do before but failed to fully achieve. (End of chapter)