Johannesburg is the economic, political and cultural center of South Africa and the famous "City of Gold". In the most prosperous part of the city, the flagship stores of more than 10 internationally renowned automobile brands such as Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz, as well as a number of furniture stores and small stores, together to build a vibrant South African business circle. A month ago, as a member of the business circle, an exhibition hall specializing in Foshan pan-household products started promotional activities, and under the promotional techniques of singing and dancing that Africans love, the passenger flow was pushed to a small peak.
Like this into the specific business areas or procurement centers of Foshan pan-home brand product exhibition hall, there are already 7 in the world. The two most recent are the South African Pavilion and the Tanzania Pavilion, which opened in Africa in December last year.
By the Canton Fair pavilion design team personally operated, standard B&Q, actually home and other domestic top home store standards, unified employment of African local employees for precision marketing, led about 70 Foshan brands landing on the African continent, within 3 months to assist Foshan enterprises to deal with more than 30 million yuan of export business... In terms of scale, specifications and practical results, the exhibition hall has reached the top level in Africa.
In Africa, pan-home furnishing, which largely meets the basic needs of people's lives, has an incomparable market advantage over other industries. In Foshan, the huge size of the pan-home is a potential trillion industry. The "going to sea" path formed by such an industry with Foshan characteristics has what enlightenment for the entire Foshan manufacturing "going out"?
Foshan
Open to overseas Foshan stores: about 70 pan-household brands have landed in Africa collectively
Not long ago, Lu Mou, vice president of Boda Group, received a message from the African branch: Foshan Pan-household brand products African Exhibition and Experience Hall (including South Africa Pavilion and Tanzania Pavilion), which was invested and guided by Foshan Commercial Bureau and built and operated by Boda Group, assisted Foshan enterprises to deal with more than 30 million yuan of export business in the past three months.
In early December 2018, Foshan opened pan-household brand product exhibition halls in Tanzania and South Africa, Africa. This is the first time for a public overseas exhibition platform led by the Foshan Municipal government and jointly established by a joint enterprise to land in Africa. About 70 Foshan pan-home brands have used this platform to enter the African market,
The exhibition halls carrying these brands are located in the most prosperous and convenient neighborhoods of cities in South Africa and Tanzania.
Located in Dar es Salaam, the economic center of Tanzania, the exhibition hall is the largest self-operated exhibition hall in the region, with an area of about 1,700 square meters, and its own logistics distribution center of nearly 6,000 square meters; Near the South African Exhibition Hall with an area of 1900 square meters, a large logistics distribution center is located in a spacious duty-free warehouse and storage center. The two pavilions are expanded on the basis of the original brand exhibition hall of Boda Group, so there is a certain basis for attracting passenger traffic.
"The exhibition hall is located near the transportation hub, the Tanzania pavilion is only 3.2 km from the port, and less than 5 km from KARIAKO, the largest commodity distribution center in East Africa; The South African pavilion is located in the heart of the country's wholesaler sourcing area for building materials, just an 8-minute drive from the country's largest international airport." Lu Moudu said.
Extended reading: Foshan pan-home brand product experience museum entered South Africa mainly for African users
After occupying the location that is most conducive to gathering merchants and logistics, the exhibition hall has not lowered its standards in interior design and decoration.
According to reports, the exhibition hall is operated by the Canton Fair exhibition hall design team personally, the target is B&Q, actually home and other top domestic home stores, each booth is built in the form of brand exhibition hall to enhance the brand image of Foshan manufacturing, such a specification of "hypermarket", in many small and medium-sized retail stores and stores in Africa has been rare.
The scene of each African employee introducing Foshan ceramics and small household appliances to local merchants on the booth reveals more profound meaning. In Africa, Boda Group employs thousands of local employees, through door-to-door promotion, regular visits to buyers, to achieve the exhibition hall exhibits precision marketing; Some promotions aimed at African cultural practices have also driven up visitor traffic. "Connecting Africans with Africans will help open up the African market made in Foshan." Lu Moudu said.
Not only to open up the market, behind the creation of the exhibition hall, many fresh attempts are reaping new dividends.
On the one hand, the centralized supply chain goes to sea to bring new cost advantages for Foshan manufacturing to go out. "Take logistics as an example. Boda Group is a strategic partner with Maersk and China Cosco," says Mr Lu. "We integrate multiple companies to declare logistics on a larger scale, so the cost of shipping is much lower than exporting by sea."
On the other hand, in addition to display sales, the exhibition hall is also exploring more new functions. Boda Group plans to cooperate with financial institutions such as CITIC Insurance to launch window financing services in Africa. Foshan enterprises can obtain a guarantee after shipping to the exhibition hall, which can be financed by the bank, and the difficulty of approval and procedures are greatly reduced. This is a new test of foreign trade financing, the current program has been in trial. "It will be of great benefit to enterprises, especially small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises." The person in charge of the surveyed enterprise said so.
Pan-home "African future" : huge market demand + budding brand awareness
It is not easy for overseas stores to succeed. What kind of strength should the operator have, and does the pan-home exhibition hall have market prospects in Africa? The answer may be found in the exploration and thinking of the Boda Group, the operator of the two African pavilions.
Starting from Tanzania, after gaining a firm foothold in the local area, the operation management department expanded to the country, which gave Boda Group a stronger international character compared with other early foreign trade enterprises.
As one of the earliest pioneers in the African market, Boda Group has been rooted in Africa for 20 years, and has not only achieved the first market share of Tanzania ceramics, but also invested in the construction of the largest ceramic production line in East Africa. At the same time, its investment in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique and other countries to build a number of hardware factories, diapers, etc., is making it a representative of the deep gold mining African market.
In October 2018, the RAND Corporation, a world-renowned comprehensive strategic research institution, released a research report, "At the Dawn of the Belt and Road Initiative: China and the Developing World," which analyzed the importance of key countries in each region to China's strategic development. The second most important region for China is Africa.
It is a continent of both opportunity and risk. The entrepreneurs who landed in Africa in the early stage were mostly interested in the profit space contained in the vast market blank.
A report by the well-known accounting firm Deloitte has analyzed that Africa will become the second largest market for the consumer goods industry in the future. "Africa's level of economic development is equivalent to that of China in the 1990s. People have the greatest demand for consumer goods to meet basic needs of food, clothing, housing and transportation, and the local market is almost empty." Lu Moudu said that pan-home is precisely in line with this demand, coupled with the continuous growth of Africa's population and GDP growth rate of about 6% per year, so compared with other industries, pan-home industry in Africa development space is particularly large.
In his view, the pan-home industry in most parts of Africa is still in a large-scale wholesale model, mainly pursuing functional use. "But the market is not static, a minority of African audiences have begun to become brand sensitive, and there are already budding brand models in some places." Companies should also be sensitive to this."
Boda Group started its advance layout three years ago. At that time, the company launched more independent brands in Africa, and built a number of product exhibition halls. With the emergence of the consumption upgrading trend belonging to the African market, the exhibition hall that has laid the foundation for offline display transactions has also put the e-commerce plan for online transactions on the agenda.
"There is a certain misconception about Africa that Internet access in Africa is limited, which is not the case. Africans are more receptive to social networking." Lu Moudu still remembers that a tweet he posted to promote the exhibition hall received tens of thousands of likes, most of them from African users, which gave him a new understanding of African netizens.
And Nigeria and a few other African countries even have a certain e-commerce network purchase foundation, "of course, logistics network, and some infrastructure construction is still Africa's short board, e-commerce marketing model is in line with the African market in the long run, but at this stage still need to be practical and carefully planned."
The new proposition of opening up: the upgrading of "going to sea" promotes the rise of trillions of industries
In fact, such as the South African pavilion, Tanzania pavilion such as Foshan Pan home exhibition hall, there are already 7 in the world, including Iran, Hungary, Australia, Malaysia and so on. Why do these pavilions target the pan-home industry? What can this new "going to sea" approach bring to Foshan?
Foshan, a large manufacturing city, building materials, home appliances, furniture, etc. are the city's advantage products, these subdivisions of the industry together formed the pan-home industry, not only achieved the "home is made in Foshan" reputation, but also become a leading industry with a huge volume. At the seventh plenary meeting of the 12th Committee of the Communist Party of Foshan this year, Foshan proposed to strive to cultivate two more than one trillion advanced manufacturing industry clusters by 2020, one of which is the pan-home industry.
Trillion-scale industry needs a higher order of market. In order to enhance the international market share of the pan-home industry, as early as 2016, Foshan formulated the "Foshan Pan-home brand products Overseas Exhibition Hall Construction three-year action Plan", and proposed to build 10 overseas Foshan pan-home brand products overseas exhibition experience hall by the end of 2019.
"The exhibition hall through the guidance of the government, enterprises operate independently, promote the eagle brand, Wave whale and other Foshan pan household brand enterprises to actively explore the international market, so that overseas customers can intuitively feel the scene, experience Foshan manufacturing, so as to promote cooperation." Foshan City Bureau of Commerce foreign trade department director of the section, Yuan Yongxin said.
In fact, in the field of Foshan pan-household industry, it is not uncommon for enterprises to explore the sea in the form of investment and technical cooperation. In 2016, Mona Lisa Ceramics built a production base in Italy, and let the Italian high-end brand enterprises with 48 years of history produce products for its brand, in order to further open the international market; Also in Italy is Genitalo, which also works with Italian designers on product development, and in February this year signed a contract in Malaysia to launch a second overseas production site.
The start-up operation of the pan-home overseas exhibition hall is different from that of these individual enterprises. It represents the rapid rise of platform-based, echelon output "holding the group to sea". Behind this approach is the combination of the government's guidance, service function and the industry's coordinating force; What it brings is the re-engineering of the whole "going out" ecology of Buddhist enterprises.
In this process, the role of the government can not be ignored. Taking the European Pavilion as an example, the basic services enjoyed by enterprises in the exhibition hall depend on the memorandum of cooperation signed between the Foshan government and the Sino-European Trade and Logistics Cooperation Park. With the help of this cooperation framework, after the actual order is generated, the Buddhas can use value-added services such as logistics, overseas warehouse, payment, finance and after-sales service provided by the Sino-European Trade and Logistics Cooperation Park Co., Ltd. according to their own needs, and take advantage of the smooth distribution network system covering major cities in Europe and China initially built by the park.
Such platforms are still springing up in Foshan, such as Zhongtao Alliance, also led by the government. The platform takes "ceramic industry + Internet" as the main mode of operation, bringing together a large number of Foshan ceramic enterprises. Through the establishment of the "Belt and Road" information center, financial service platform, to provide the corresponding big data and financial services, Zhongtao Union is also "holding the group to the sea" and entering the market of countries along the "Belt and Road".
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Pan-home exhibition hall in Foshan as the center to the world radiation
Gather high-quality resources to build a support network
In order to clarify the positioning of the overseas exhibition hall and give full play to the efficacy of the exhibition hall, Foshan carried out the layout from the top design as early as 2016. In the layout, according to the "Foshan Pan-household brand products Overseas Exhibition Hall Construction three-year action Plan", according to the standards of having a certain trade and investment foundation with Foshan, a good business environment, a strong regional radiation influence, and a large market potential, Select important nodes along the "One Belt and One Road" and Foshan key trade and investment destination countries layout Foshan pan-home brand products overseas exhibition experience museum.
From a regional perspective, the exhibition hall is centered in Foshan and radiates to the world, aiming at the surrounding countries, such as Malaysia, and covering non-traditional markets with great potential such as Iran, as well as developed economies such as the United States and Australia, and emerging economies such as South Africa.
Another feature of the exhibition hall is the cooperation between government and enterprise. On the one hand, with leading enterprises as the core, set up Foshan pan-home brand products overseas exhibition experience museum enterprise alliance; On the other hand, give full play to the government's power to gather high-quality resources and build a support network of Foshan pan-home brand products overseas exhibition experience museum.
In this layout, combined with the local conditions, each overseas exhibition hall also has its own characteristics.
At the end of September 2016, the first Foshan pan-household brand products overseas exhibition and experience museum was launched in Tehran, the capital of Iran. A major goal of the museum is to maximize the advantages of seamless docking between domestic manufacturers and foreign buyers. In the exhibition hall, overseas buyers can directly communicate with domestic factories by scanning the product QR code; The exhibition hall also developed an APP to provide Chinese and English translation services, and collected big data of products to feed back to Foshan manufacturers.
In 2017, "Foshan Manufacturing" entered Hungary to establish the first European pan-household brand product exhibition and experience museum. The museum has enjoyed the benefits of China-Eu cooperation. After the actual order is generated, the stationed enterprises can use the value-added services such as logistics, overseas warehouse, payment, finance and after-sales service provided by the China-Eu Business Logistics Cooperation Park Co., Ltd. and the local distribution network system to effectively reduce the international operation cost and risk cost for Chinese enterprises.
The Australian Pavilion, which also opened in 2017, was built by the Foshan Municipal government in cooperation with the Lesso Group, relying on the group's Global Home Australia project. The exhibition and experience museum has a construction area of about 30,000 square meters, and the total booth area is about 7,000 square meters, which is the largest single-floor exhibition center of building materials and other household products in Sydney at that time. Famous enterprises such as Midea, Wanhe and Jinitao are exhibiting in the experience hall.
Offline, the Australian Pavilion provides business consulting services, docking with overseas buyers and industry associations, and direct marketing promotion and other supporting services for Buddhist enterprises. Online, the pavilion uses the cross-border e-commerce platform of Lingshang Global Home to set up a special area of "Foshan Pan-household brand products" to provide online global promotion and supporting services for Buddhist enterprises.
