Haidilao is not Starbucks

Author | Wang Xiaoling

Starbucks is about to start a new round of expansion. I have to say that this global coffee chain company loves and is good at expansion.

At the investor exchange meeting on September 14, Starbucks announced its store expansion plan, including adding 2,000 stores in the US market in the next three years, and opening another 3,000 in China.

Chain catering expansion is not easy. Since March last year, Haidilao's stock price has fallen all the way. The stock price has fallen from HK $ 70 to HK $ 16, and the market value is less than 100 billion. The problem of Haidilao is the expansion of the market in the epidemic. It has to perform the woodpecker plan and stop the store.

Haidilao and Starbucks cannot be used directly for comparison, but Starbucks has also turned over the car in the past decades. Later, Starbucks founder Schultz returned to stop loss in time.

In 2008, the most important measure of Schultz was to use new technologies to reduce costs and increase efficiency. In fact, for more than ten years, he has also worked hard to optimize the efficiency of store drinks with new technologies. For example, at the investor communication meeting this time, he also said that by using a new technology to reduce the production time of Xingbingle by one -third, and the 16 steps to make a cup of a drink in a drink Wait.

In addition to the hard cost of rent raw materials, the biggest cost of catering chain is manpower. In fact, like Schultz, Zhang Yong, the founder of Haidilao, also emphasized that it is necessary to use technology to improve efficiency (reduce employees), but in a simple comparison, you will find the difference between the two.

Price increase of profit margins

Sichuan girl Xiao Zhang, who works in Beijing, loves hot pot very much, and often takes parents to eat. However, she didn't go to Haidilao for half a year.

Compared with the bills on her account, she was startled. In 2019, a family of three hot pot was 390 yuan, which has become 490 yuan this year. After discovering the price of the dishes, she ordered less dishes than before. Many expensive things dare to order half of them, but the bottom of the pot rose from 78 yuan to 109 yuan, and the small ingredients also rose from 3 yuan to 10 yuan. One.

There are a lot of prices on the public comments, and Xiao Zhang feels that this has affected the business of Haidilao. Xiao Zhang is used to going to a Haidilao shop near her home. The location is not hot.

In terms of financial reports, Haidilao's average turnover rate in the first half of this year was 2.9 / day, which was less than 3 times lower than the profit and loss balance point. In terms of unit price, it increased from 107.3 yuan last year to 109.1 yuan.

The unit price of the customer has not changed much. The previous explanation of Haidilao was because of half a dish, such as the order volume of half -dish in 2021 than half of 2020. Limited to the price of half dishes, the customer unit price is difficult to increase.

However, Haidilao did not have half a dish recently, but it was launched in 2006. Xiao Zhang said that she did not dare to order too many whole dishes, after all, the bottom of the pot and small materials were almost two hundred.

The profit margin of Haidilao is raised by price increase. Then, from the perspective of reducing costs and efficiency, the cost reduction must be considered after the efficiency is increased. The first thing to think of is labor cost. Haidilao, which has always been serving, has been high in the past few years.

Haidilao's employee benefits are higher than that of most peers, and the proportion of salary is significantly exceeded. In 2017, the per capita cost of Haidilao's employees was 62,000 yuan, which was 1.68 times the average annual salary of the national catering service and hotel industry. In 2021, the cost of employee was 14.875 billion yuan, an increase of 5.199 billion yuan over 2020, and the proportion of employee costs increased from 33.8% to 36.2%.

Even in the first half of 2022 in the first half of 2022, the closing shop failed to suppress the labor cost. The financial report showed that the cost of Haidilao employees accounted for 35.2%, which was not much changed compared to the previous few years.

The high cost of employees, on the one hand, the increase in the number of employees and the increase in salaries of employees; on the other hand, the income growth cannot keep up with the growth rate of employment costs brought about by rapid expansion.

As mentioned earlier, Starbucks's expansion also turned over the car, which was in 2008.

The Starbucks brand was founded in 1971 and evolved to our familiar coffee chain in 1987. After this, the founder Howe Schultz has been firmly promoting Starbucks's expansion strategy. Before 2000, Starbucks opened a store in the United States to enjoy the financial dividend brought by the scale effect.

Perhaps the situation has been set. In 2000, Howard Schultz, who has worked for many years, resigned from the position of Starbucks president and CEO as the chairman of the company's board of directors.

However, the scale effect brought by the expansion of the catering industry has its own ceiling, and the price war pressure brought by competitors such as Diega McDonald's and the influence of the financial crisis. I encountered difficulties, and for the first time in Q1 in 2008, the same store revenue declined.

As a result, Howard Schultz became CEO again. What did Schultz do? Simply put, cost reduction and efficiency and marketing diversion.

In terms of store employees, Starbucks has been using technical investment to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Before Schultz returned, Starbucks store mainly used the semi -automatic coffee machine La Marzocco. The barista needed manual operation to control the extraction time and pressure. The time for making a cup of coffee is often more than 3 minutes. Starbucks has always been famous for its employees to create a corporate culture with a sense of temperature belonging. Direct layoffs will obviously affect this person. So, how to improve people's effectiveness?

After Schultz returned, he gradually replaced the semi -automatic coffee machine with a fully automatic coffee machine such as Verismo and Mastrena to simplify the coffee production process and improve the efficiency of coffee production. The degree of standardization and the reduction of manual operation to ensure the stability of the coffee quality. Such automated equipment and standardized processes can greatly reduce stores' technical dependence on employees.

This not only reduces the number of employees needed for single stores. Because the fully automatic coffee machine actually only needs to be a "key barista", and the simple training can be served, which greatly reduces the training cost of new employees. In this way, the fewer and fewer clerks can be used in the process of opening a new store in the future without layoffs.

What hinder Haidilao

Since its listing, Haidilao has revealed that there are many high -tech software and hardware technologies that have been revealed to the outside world. At least, it sounds much taller than Starbucks technology.

Taking the first smart restaurant opened in Beijing in 2018 as an example, including automatic machine -automatically served, rotor robots, smart vegetable machines and pocket machines, central kitchen direct finished vegetables and other equipment and technologies. At that time, the relevant reports pointed out that the purpose of these technologies was to reduce costs as "machine substitutions".

If this technology can be promoted in the store, it can definitely cut the labor cost of Haidilao. It will not even affect the quality of service that Haidilao has always been proud, because the services that customers can feel are mainly concentrated in the front hall, but the number of waiters with contact with customers is not high in the entire store.

Generally speaking, hot pot shops are divided into front halls and back kitchen. For example, about 200 square meters of stores, the front hall requires managers, supervisors, leaders, service staff, and cashier. It requires 5-6 people. The chef has a chef, a curator, a disabled, etc., which requires 7-8 people.

According to previous Haidilao, the company's IKMS smart chef brain (Insight Knowledge Management Systems knowledge management system), real -time monitoring and management, maintaining the operation of the entire unmanned background, from ordering to side dishes to serving, realizing back kitchen kitchen Automated production, it is said that nearly 37% of the labor costs of the kitchen can be saved.

In other words, even if the persons that customers can see are not moving, only part of the replacement of some back kitchen employees can reduce the labor cost by at least 20%. Of course, there is no need to use the price increase to increase the profit margin.

It cannot be said that Zhang Yong does not pay attention to technology. In Zhang Yong's view, the biggest problem in the catering industry should be technology. He once said: "I believe that the new technology should not be subversive to the traditional industry, and it should be to improve efficiency. The transformation of the mobile Internet for this traditional industry should start."

In a minutes circulating this year, Zhang Yong once again emphasized that technology is one of the directions he will pay attention to.

So why is the investment in new technologies so slow?

According to the previous explanation of Haidilao, due to the difficulty of renovation of old stores, technological promotion is mainly based on single technologies. In the construction of new stores, more attempts will try to gather a variety of new technologies into one store.

The woodpecker plan closing objects are mainly new stores. In other words, the replacement of machines has not made much progress in the past year.

This makes Haidilao fall into the dilemma of unavailable technology and money that cannot be spent.

In fact, Haidilao's money did not spend it. In 2018, Haidilao said that 60% of the funds were used for expansion, and 20% were used to develop and use new technologies. However, the latest financial report shows that of the four funds listed, only the technical application is not used up, and HK $ 1.459 billion is currently only more than 600 million.

Many methods of Haidilao are elusive. Take hot pot as an example. It is said that more than 67 million toys were sent in 2021, and hot pot accessories and lipstick were also made. Don't say anything else, how many girls who eat hot pot are willing to wear hot pot ingredient earrings?

Compared with technology, Haidilao has another old problem, how to achieve brand renewal. In the Chinese market, this problem is more obvious. The taste of customers is particularly fast, and the new stores and new brands come out one after another.

For a long time, the outside world has interpreted the aging of Haidilao from the perspective of unfavorable product research and development. That's right, a large single product like Ba Nu's hairy belly can indeed be new to the store. In the past two years, Haidilao has indeed no impressive new products.

However, the chain catering is originally the largest convention business, and most people like things, and it is inevitable that it will be slightly mediocre. Moreover, like McDonald's, Haidilao is essentially a factory model. Most ingredients are processed in the factory and sent to the store. While vigorously promoting the perfect "copying and paste" of Haidilao's stores, it also makes it difficult for Haidilao to produce radical product innovation at any time.

Then again, large items can bring traffic, but it is not the only diversion method. It is more direct to renew the brand with marketing, that is, to enhance the brand's influence. Take Starbucks as an example. After Schultz returned in 2008, it changed the previous low -key style. In addition to buying a single paid broadcast point for NBC "Saturday Night Live", Starbucks also launched an election supporting advertisement during the 2008 US election. Citizens can get a cup of Starbucks coffee for free after voting. Tens of millions of users.

Haidilao has not showed any decent capacity in this regard. In recent years, it has been hotly searched, almost all negative news such as price increases.

For chain companies, whether it is expansion or contraction front, it should be a comprehensive strategy. It requires a common cooperation of products, technology, management, and marketing, not just staring at the sales data in front of you.

Back in 2008, at the investor meeting after returning, Schultz announced a series of measures, and decided not to announce the sales of the same store, the most important data for this retail industry.

The reason he gave in the book "Along the Way" was that when he had not returned to the CEO position, he once walked into the Starbucks store, and was shocked to find that the shop was full of cute plush toys that had nothing to do with coffee. The store manager explained that these toys have greatly contributed to sales and profits.

In his opinion, the sales of the same store are dangerous enemies during the change. Schultz hopes to drive out Starbucks with short -sighted eyes and plush toys that are too far away, instead of saying not to do surroundings. Later, Starbucks can cooperate with cold drink coffee to show the cat's claw cup, which is very popular on social platforms.

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