On May 16, Sun Art Retail released its 2023 fiscal year performance report as of March 31. The revenue reached 83.662 billion yuan and the operating profit was 1.177 billion yuan. stores. Sun Art turned losses into profits, with a net profit of 78 million.
“We will continue to invest in the exploration and development of multiple business formats, including the polishing of M member stores, the expansion of Zhongrunfa, and the exploration of Xiaorunfa, so as to create a second growth curve for Sun Art Retail.” Lin Xiaohai, CEO of Sun Art Retail, said, “Online hour delivery has become a standard configuration for all supermarkets. Sun Art will continue to improve the certainty and stability of quality and service, and become an online fulfillment center to meet the needs of online users anytime, anywhere.”
Affected by the epidemic in 2022, many stores across the country are temporarily closed and their business hours are shortened. The supermarket industry is facing pressure from omni-channel competition. Nevertheless, in the 2023 fiscal year, Sun Art Retail will improve the national fresh food supply chain by creating differentiated commodity strength, give full play to the advantages of omni-channel and multi-format operation, and achieve double-digit growth in unit price per customer and online revenue.
ćCreate differentiated commodity strength and launch own brandć
In this fiscal year, Sun Art Retail created differentiated product capabilities, accelerated category expansion and product de-homogenization, and established its own brand department and research and development capabilities for differentiated products. In the fourth quarter, differentiated products ranked first in sales of the same category.
In 2022, RT-Mart will launch its own brand. Lime juice sold 100,000 bottles in the first week of its launch, making it one of the “three new” Chinese New Year drinks along with coconut water and sparkling water. This year, a variety of healthy and leisure snacks such as coconut water, alcohol coconut milk, whole wheat soda biscuits and egg rolls were launched. Focusing on store-to-store and home-to-home services, RT-Mart continues to promote product upgrades, launching the “Treasure Commodities” RT100 series, covering fresh, fruit, cooked food, bakery, FMCG and textiles, and upgrading its own brand “Runfa Workshop”.
In order to allow consumers to buy fresher and better fresh products and maintain the stability of fresh product quality and price competitiveness, Sun Art Retail will build a total of 14 standard fresh food warehouses in fiscal year 2023, covering more than 80% of the stores across the country. Among them, 100% of the stores realize self-operated vegetables, and more than half of the stores realize self-operated fruits. The operating cost of warehouse distribution has been greatly reduced, effectively reducing the loss of vegetables and fruits and improving price competitiveness. In the future, Sun Art will deepen the construction of the fresh food supply chain, accelerate investment in the national expansion of the fresh food supply chain, and establish full-link solutions for core categories.
[RT-Mart has reconstructed more than 80 stores, and the first M member store opens in Yangzhou]
In this fiscal year, Sun Art Retail established the M member store division. In April, the first nationwide store of M member store officially opened, becoming the first warehouse-style paid membership store brand in Yangzhou. The number of paying members before the store opened was better than expected.
Focusing on the “offline experience center” strategy, Sun Art Retail actively promotes the replication of the store reconstruction 2.0 model, starts the digital exploration of the store 3.0, and focuses on the improvement of store efficiency. The 2.0 model has verified the value of RT-Mart’s “shopping”. In the last fiscal year, RT-Mart restructured 2.0 and opened its first store in Wuxi. In this fiscal year, RT-Mart completed the 2.0 reconstruction of more than 80 stores across the country, continued to optimize the tenant structure of shopping streets, and reduced the vacancy rate. Sun Art has 12 home mart (RT-Mart super), and opened 5 new stores in the fiscal year. In the future, Sun Art will continue to invest in RT-Mart’s national layout, focus on advantageous areas, and give full play to RT-Mart’s supply chain advantages to boost medium and long-term growth.
In addition to the offline experience center, Sun Art continues to build a reliable online fulfillment center to improve the certainty and stability of experience and services. In this fiscal year, the B2C business continued to grow and became the core competitiveness of Sun Art, with a revenue growth of more than 15%. The revenue of its own app “RT-Mart Youxian” increased by about 40% compared with the same period in the previous fiscal year. Sun Artās Taoxianda business has continued to grow steadily, and it is the core supply of Taobaoās near-field fresh food category; the unit price per customer of Ele.meās channel has increased, driving revenue to increase by nearly 20% compared with the same period of the previous fiscal year.
In the future, Sun Art Retail will focus on the development of four major strategies and the construction of two major capabilities, including the four major strategies of “differentiated product strength, offline experience center, online contract fulfillment center, multi-format and omni-channel development”, and fresh food Warehouse capacity and digital capacity building, becoming a leader in the digital transformation of physical retail and a benchmark for new retail.
“In fiscal year 2024, the competition will become more intense, and the business model of hypermarkets will be challenged even more. Sun Art Retail will focus more on the target customers who just need offline, create healthy and happy user value on the basis of quality-price ratio, and become an offline experience center , so that target customers love life and visit RT-Mart.ā Lin Xiaohai said.