After five years of exploration and thinking, HEMA is extending to the upstream of the fresh supply chain. On December 20, the digital agricultural beef industry cluster jointly built by nullandi and HEMA was officially put into operation in Zibo, Shandong Province. The park covers an area of 600 mu and has four modern processing warehouses with a monomer area of more than 18000 square meters, including two beef and mutton processing warehouses, HEMA vegetable warehouses and HEMA fruit warehouses. It carries the full-automatic production, processing, cutting, sorting and sub packaging distribution center of fresh vegetables and fruits, fresh beef and mutton and other industries. Hou Yi, CEO of HEMA, told the media, including interface news, that the project had been prepared for two years. Since Zibo became China's first "HEMA city" (HEMA digital agriculture rural demonstration city) last year, HEMA, Newland and the local government quickly planned and arranged the industry and built digital infrastructure. "Today, HEMA is building its own brand system. The core of this system is to provide differentiated supply. The difference lies in the quality of products and the efficiency of production and retail. After the project is put into operation, on the one hand, it can support the development of HEMA's original beef brand, on the other hand, it can more quickly realize the whole process from production and breeding to processing, improve retail efficiency, and basically come out on the first day Column, you can see the goods in the store the next day. " Hou Yi said that if we want to achieve such an efficient production and processing system, we must have a digital base. The beef and mutton aseptic production workshop is fully automated in slitting, sorting and repacking. Photo by Cheng Lu According to the interface news, in the aseptic production workshop in the beef and mutton processing warehouse, the beef cutting, sorting and sub packaging are completed on the full-automatic production line, dozens of production lines operate at full speed, and the mechanical arm is responsible for sorting and labeling the beef. Workers in white sterile clothes only need to check the equipment and data. According to the technical director of the park, all the equipment of the production line are from Germany and Japan, specially designed and customized by the other party, and the daily output can reach 260 tons. The data screen records the total number of stock in pastoral areas on that day, the total number of slaughters on that day, the real-time order volume of each city, the coordinates of logistics carriers and other core data. HEMA and nullandi jointly explore the whole process of agricultural breeding, planting and production with standardized digital management. The upstream expansion of HEMA is to create supply chain advantages. Only when the upstream strength of the industrial chain is strong enough, HEMA, as a retail terminal, can get products with higher cost performance. Just a few days ago, Hou Yi reflected and summarized the development of HEMA in the past five years. In 2016, as the leader of Alibaba's new retail, HEMA began to run wildly. However, in the process of hard exploration, Hou Yi found that HEMA was difficult to do well after it went abroad, so he began to reflect on whether there was a problem with its business model. "In the past 2018 and 2019, HEMA took many detours. One was localization. The other was that we overemphasized 'people's livelihood' rather than 'consumption upgrading'. In 2019, HEMA became a hypermarket. We thought that the mode of making a vegetable market might be closer to the people, but later we found that it could not compete with the local hypermarkets." In the second half of 2019, HEMA began to suspend the opening of new towns. When seeing Costco's momentum in China, Hou Yi led HEMA's team to study what's good about them. He found that Costco is to "achieve the ultimate quality of goods". Costco's global supply chain procurement finally achieved the ultimate cost performance. "China's retail industry should have its own brand ability, including global purchasing ability, supply chain reengineering, process optimization, and finally realize differentiated competition." Hou Yi realized that if all Chinese enterprises want to go on, they must adhere to characteristics rather than localization. Hou Yi hopes that HEMA will create a "HEMA category" in each category in the future. The commodities should be streamlined, and the goal is to achieve quality competitiveness or value competitiveness. The cooperation with nullandi is the "box horse products" practiced by box horse in the beef field. By cooperating with nullandi to build its own beef production line, HEMA will optimize and transform the process and efficiency of the supply chain in a digital way to strengthen the beef category. Newland brand and HEMA were founded in 2016 and have grown together with HEMA since its establishment. In 2017, Newland first settled in Shanghai HEMA with its own snow black cow brand, which is also the only domestic black cow brand of HEMA; In 2020, it surpassed other pork brands and became the first brand in box horse sales. Now, nullandi has been firmly the first brand in box horse. It can be said that Newland has entered the "circle of friends" with strong strength of HEMA. With the help of HEMA channel, Newland has entered 300 HEMA stores in 27 cities across the country. By February 2021, Newland had completed the construction of three national supply chain centers, 27 cold chain links and six sub warehouses. Next, Newland will use multi brand (Newland, Hefu, Newland and Newland) matrix strategy to cover more diversified consumption scenarios and seize consumer groups and market shares at different market levels. In the retail industry, the advantage of the supply chain depends on a strong market share. When the market share is higher and the supply chain cost is lower, the advantage will be more obvious. Starting from the beef industry chain, nullandi will broaden and deepen the industry chain in the future to further provide supply chain advantages for HEMA. "Nullandi is not only a beef brand produced and sold by itself. In the future, it will also be imported from all over the world, and then provide high-quality products for China through deep processing." Hou Yi told interface news that in terms of the construction of its own supply chain system, in the future, HEMA will also cooperate with nullandi to launch a light food salad brand for young people. (Xinhua News Agency)