Beauty dilemma： it starts with the flow and stops at the product.

Chupin, 21st Century Innovation Capital Research Institute

With the rise of Z generation and social platforms in China, in the past two or three years, a large wave of e-commerce has appeared in the outlet of new consumption, and countless new consumer brands have sprung up. With the help of online celebrity’s new traffic portal, through cooperation with Li Jiaqi, Viya and massive Xiaohongshu KOC, it seems that the brand has become popular and "out of the circle" overnight.

Behind the rapid rise of domestic beauty is the blessing of capital. According to the "2021 Beauty Industry Trend Insight Report" released by CBN Data, in 2020, the beauty industry disclosed that the investment and financing amount was 4.812 billion yuan, a growth rate of 324% compared with 1.135 billion yuan in 2019. With Dongfeng, Perfect Diary and Winona’s IPO, Winona’s parent company Betaine (300957) went public in March this year.

Starting with flow

Back in 2016, Huang Jinfeng just stepped down from Yu Nifang and established Yixian E-commerce (YSG.N). The company name is Huang Jinfeng to pay tribute to his alma mater, Sun Yat-sen, and Chen Yuwen and Lu Jianhua, the co-founders of FMCG brand, are friends of Huang Jinfeng’s college classmates for many years. Zhang Lei of Gaoyan Capital once asserted that China must have a chance to give birth to a new L ‘Oré al, but is the "new L ‘Oré al" a perfect diary? Perhaps it is still open to question.

Undoubtedly, the capital blessing of the "golden owners" has provided it with a steady stream of power. Since March 2017, Yixian E-commerce has launched the first perfect diary of cosmetics brand. With its cost-effective products featuring "big brand replacement", it has a consumer group that meets its positioning among many high-end brand cosmetics. Whenever users have complaints about the experience of perfect diary products, there will always be something like "only a few tens of dollars, what else do you want!" Comments. In a short period of three and a half years, Yixian E-commerce has completed seven times of financing and gone to IPO, and the capital lineup behind it is also extremely luxurious, including Gaoyan Capital, which holds 13.8%, Zhenge Fund, which holds 10.5%, and Gaorong Capital, which holds 9.2%, as well as many big-name investment institutions such as Boyu Capital, Tiger Global and Sequoia China. It has been revealed that in last year’s round of financing, "new shareholders came in by grabbing, otherwise they were done by old shareholders."

Obviously, the business model of Perfect Diary is the most typical "Internet play" in recent years. It was pushed to the market after relying on funds to seize the market crazily, and its fast-moving speed is also a "double-edged sword". According to the national enterprise credit publicity information system, there are 38 patents of Perfect Diary (Yixian E-commerce), all of which are appearance patents, and there is no core R&D patent information such as component technology.

From 2018 to 2020, the sales and marketing expenses of Yixian e-commerce were 309 million yuan, 1.251 billion yuan and 3.412 billion yuan, respectively. The overwhelming advertisements revealed the new generation of consumers’ cognition of the perfect diary. In fact, spending money on marketing has achieved a lot. Generation Z has gradually become the main force of consumption. Nowadays, brands can quickly establish consumers’ minds and brand awareness by using the effects of online celebrity and stars. Packaging theme design with "ingenuity" and "face value" and cross-border joint names can quickly capture consumers’ hearts. In the beauty track, cross-border joint products have exploded in just three years, with a growth rate of nearly three times.

The turning point occurred in February 2018. The keen marketing team of Perfect Diary found that many users published brand color testing and grass planting content on Little Red Book. Planting grass on the surface is actually dark and wide, which makes Perfect Diary see the possibility of new users’ growth. The data shows that in June 2017, the number of users of Little Red Books was only 50 million, but it surged to 100 million yuan in March of the following year, and the user activity was close to 30 million, three times that of a year ago. Perfect Diary rode the express train of Xiaohongshu, and the sales volume was singing all the way.

Product dilemma

However, beauty brands have to speak with products after all. Despite the large number of new products on the Perfect Diary, there is still no impressive and timeless big single product. On the cost side, big single products do not need to be upgraded repeatedly, which is difficult to be eliminated and does not require high new product promotion fees. However, the money of the perfect diary is spent on advertising, and the product research and development that needs real money most is far from enough. Perfect Diary’s R&D expenditure in 2020 is only 67 million yuan, accounting for 0.93% of revenue. In 2018 and 2019, it is only 3 million yuan and 23 million yuan.

As a result of the lack of research and development, although the products are dazzling, they have always changed their forms and the repurchase rate is not optimistic.According to the data of CICC Research Institute, after trying to cooperate with Xiaohongshu, Tik Tok and KOL, the sales of Shiseido, L ‘Oreal and Estee Lauder all increased by more than 60% in 2020, while the sales of Perfect Diary increased by only 22%. In addition, another major "injury" of Perfect Diary is its low gross profit, which positions the brand as "big brand replacement", but its gross profit margin is 10% to 20% lower than that of Estee Lauder and Huaxi Bio. If you want to break the dilemma of low gross profit, the simplest and most direct way is to raise the price, but rashly raising the price will inevitably affect the biggest "advantage" of the perfect diary-cost performance. Therefore, Perfect Diary came up with the method of "reducing the quantity without reducing the price". Under the condition of normal lipstick net content of 3 to 4 grams, the "small heel" lipstick is only 0.8 grams.

At present, there are more and more enterprises on the national makeup track, and with the extrusion of foreign competing products, "cost performance" is no longer the most important cornerstone for domestic products to break through. At the moment when market recognition is increasing, quality is the goal that domestic beauty brands need to pursue.

Today, the domestic beauty industry has a perfect supply chain and industrial chain, which provides a very fertile soil for domestic brands to go to sea.According to CBNData’s "2021 Beauty Industry Trend Insight Report", Guangzhou has become a well-deserved incubator for new beauty consumer brands.According to the report data, nearly three-quarters of Tmall sellers in Guangzhou are mainly engaged in "face value industry" such as beauty care, which is 1.6 times of the national proportion; Guangzhou has more than half of the number of domestic cosmetics companies filing.In the past three years, the sales of Guangzhou beauty and skin care brands on Tmall platform have nearly tripled, such as Perfect Diary, Flower West, Tangduo, Zhiben and Runbaiyan.

Obviously, the biggest possibility for domestic brands to choose to go to sea is that their domestic losses are serious, and they urgently need to open up new markets and take international routes to raise prices for future research and development of high-end products.With the listing of Yixian e-commerce, I once said that I would take the perfect diary of domestic brand Thorn Road. The best interpretation of going out to sea is to try to acquire international brands and then turn to high-end market development.On October 30, 2020, Perfect Diary announced that it had reached an agreement with Pierre Fabre Group of France to acquire its high-end beauty brand Galénic；; On March 2, 2021, Perfect Diary said that it had reached an agreement with Manzanita Capital, a venture capital institution headquartered in London, to acquire its high-end skin care brand "Hermes in makeup remover" Eve Lom.The successive high-end acquisitions have made Perfect Diary’s cash flow tight. According to the annual report, the net cash flow generated by Perfect Diary’s annual business activities in 2020 was 983 million yuan.

At present, the most popular beauty products are lipstick, eye shadow and blush. According to the data of China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the export volume of beauty cosmetics and toiletries in China in 2020 is 999,000 tons, up by 4.3% year-on-year. With the help of e-commerce brands such as Tmall and Amazon, it is easier for new brands to go to sea.

In the future, it is still unknown that the perfect diary plan will cost billions of dollars in marketing expenses. However, when the heat and sales shine, will the perfect diary develop "luminous" products that will make the market refreshing?What consumers are more concerned about is how to gain a foothold in the market where new products are repeated after eating the perfect diary of traffic bonus.

The product business model of Perfect Diary is DHC, that is, Direct to Customer. In the list of foundries published in Perfect Diary, Ying Teli, Kosmeishi, Shanghai Zhenchen, etc. are all foundries of internationally renowned big-name nature halls, Polaiya, Dior, Chanel and Maybelline. With years of OEM experience,These foundries also have both design and R&D capabilities. It is not difficult to understand that behind the endless stream of new products, the R&D expenses account for only 0.9%.What will be the next step of the perfect diary under the loss? Obviously, the product quality of Perfect Diary can’t compete with the same brand, but the price is in an awkward position of "more than enough, more than enough". Consumers are paying for its "eye-catching" theme and packaging, and the name of "ZARA in beauty industry" is well deserved.

Although the performance of Marubi Co., Ltd. (603983) does not rely too much on marketing, it is also labeled as "single product". Marubi Co., Ltd. has three brands: Marubi, Chunji and Love Fire, and its core brand and revenue force are Marubi, which accounts for more than 90% of the company’s total revenue all the year round.

The advantage of Marumi lies in the solid foundation of its inherent customers. Since 2017, Marumi’s net interest rate has always remained between 20% and 30%, and Polaiya (603605) has also remained above 10%.

Track change

It is not easy for Marubi to cultivate high-end products and face the fierce competition in the cosmetics market with high gross profit margin when only Marubi brand stands out.Marubi’s gross profit margin in the first quarter of 2021 was 63.91%, which was 2.29 percentage points lower than the 66.20% at the end of 2020. Compared with the gross profit margins of benchmark enterprises Polaiya (64.09%) and shanghai jahwa (64.56%) in the first quarter of 2020, Marubi no longer has the advantage of high gross profit margin.

At the moment when the explosion of beauty products has sprung up, Marubi shares urgently need to find new consumption points to make consumers pay for high prices, so as to seize new profit growth points and highlight the encirclement. It is worth noting that on November 12, 2020, Marubi announced that it planned to abandon the original "make-up" fundraising project. The investment in the new project is estimated to be 276 million yuan, which will mainly focus on skin care products, supplemented by make-up products. After completion, it is expected to add 3,382.5 tons of skin care products and 200 tons of make-up products, fully reaching the annual output value of about 596 million yuan, which will continue to deepen the layout of the company’s skin care industry chain.

From this point of view, Marumi shares plan to abandon the fast-growing makeup track and turn to the skin care track.Not only that, Marumi shares also intend to invest in food and beverage and new retail consumer industries. On October 29th, 2020, Marubi announced that the company intends to jointly invest with several partners to set up an industrial fund with a scale of 100 million yuan, which will mainly invest in domestic and foreign high-quality or high-growth enterprises in consumer industries related to food and beverage, condiments and new retail, so as to build an ecological circle of food industry. One of the limited partners is Shanghai’s "coming to Iraq".Marubi Co., Ltd. said that this investment direction has a certain correlation with the company’s main business, mainly functional foods related to beauty.

The domestic beauty cosmetics who are striding forward all the way, the "circle" is getting bigger and bigger, but it seems to be getting farther and farther away from what people expect.After the rapid rise of national cosmetics with capital, what will be the next step? After the "fan economy" and "face value economy", Chinese cosmetics still need to rely on high-quality differentiated items to gain a foothold in the market.

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