When the lease expires, CR Vanguard will gradually close or upgrade several Guangzhou stores.
Text/Yangcheng Evening News All-Media Reporter Xu Yue
Figure/provided by respondents
On December 16th, Guangbai opened a new Rhine store in Conghua, which was regarded as the final work in the sprint stage of Lingnan Group’s retail sector consumption boost. Next month, CR Vanguard will open a new Liwan Health Port Store, which is an upgraded hypermarket store; Around Guangzhou, Yuehui Plaza Nanhai, a new project of Yuexiu Commercial Management in Nanhai District, Foshan City, will also open on December 24th, which is the first revitalization and upgrading project after the asset management strategy upgrade of Yuexiu Commercial Management. Since the beginning of this year, on the one hand, some stores have announced the closing curtain call, on the other hand, brand-new stores have announced the opening of the city, and the old and new are intertwined, and the retail format has become more and more complex and diverse.
In the third quarter of the country, more than 100 new shopping malls were opened, with the largest number in Guangzhou.
Although the sound of closing stores in shopping malls is one after another, Guangzhou is welcoming more new stores, and the fashion consumption map of Guangzhou is constantly being iteratively updated.
According to statistics from Win Business University, in the third quarter of 2023, there were 104 shopping malls in China, including 20 in Guangdong. From the perspective of urban distribution, in the third quarter, there were 65 cities all over the country, and Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai ranked the top three in terms of the number of opening projects, of which Guangzhou ranked first in terms of number.
In the relatively off-season of November, Guangzhou also has Tianhe Pavilion Plaza, which is the largest single shopping center in Pearl River New Town. The first store, space and experience have been improved in an all-round way, and at the same time, a pet-friendly shopping MALL has been built to rejuvenate the new vision of Guangzhou’s stock mall transformation.
"Upgrade" became the key word, and the brand started a new round of attacking the city.
In the sound of business opening, "upgrade" has become a key word repeatedly mentioned. In the new round of siege, each brand is dominated by its own brand upgrade plan.
For example, Guangbai has been committed to rejuvenating the "new vitality of the old city" in Guangzhou. In the brand layout upgrade of Conghua Rheinhui Store, it focuses on differentiated management and builds a local high-end fashion retail experience center; As early as 2021, Lingzhan, known as the master of stock business transformation, acquired the original Guangzhou Sun Xintiandi Shopping Center for 3,204.7 million yuan and renamed it Guangzhou Tianhe Lingzhan Plaza. At the same time, it invested about 300 million yuan in the first phase of asset upgrading project to upgrade the shopping mall into a brand-new "humanistic life circle". By the time it was fully opened in November, the total sales in October had increased by more than 30% compared with that in September and 65% compared with the same period last year.
When the lease expires, CR Vanguard will gradually close or upgrade several Guangzhou stores.
As a traditional supermarket, CR Vanguard also launched a new strategy of store upgrading this year, facing "breaking" and "establishing" directly. The relevant person in charge said frankly that if the decline of traditional supermarkets has become an irresistible trend; Then, the long-term way of development is for traditional supermarkets to transform in time and launch a format that is more suitable for current consumption habits. Transformation means "breaking" and "standing".
"Breaking" means adjusting, adjusting the new format, adjusting the business structure, adjusting the distribution of stores and so on. Taking "cost" as an example, the most unavoidable mountain in traditional supermarkets is the high cost of store rent. Because the hard demand of traditional supermarkets is often that the venue is large, the location is good and the passenger flow is high, which also means paying high rental costs behind it. In contrast, e-commerce platforms do not need to consider store rents in commercial locations, which directly leads to the difficulty for traditional hypermarkets to compete with e-commerce platforms for prices.
"So why do we frequently hear the news that supermarkets are closed in recent years? On the one hand, except for the natural price advantage of online shopping e-commerce, on the other hand, the lease period of supermarket hypermarkets is generally 10 -20 years. For supermarkets that have experienced the golden age of China retail industry for 20 years, the lease is just gradually expiring in recent years. If you want to renew the contract, the current rent level is definitely much higher than that of more than a decade ago, especially in the core business districts of the city. In the supermarket industry that values’ flat efficiency’ most, in the face of this greatly increased cost expectation, it may be the best choice to close the store after the lease expires. "
Take Guangzhou as an example. CR Vanguard has been doing neighborhood business in Yangcheng for more than ten years. However, with the expiration of more and more store leases and the change of Guangzhou city, CR Vanguard will gradually close or upgrade many Guangzhou stores.
"Break" first, then "establish". Different from other supermarkets’ closing, CR Vanguard said that the next "closing" does not mean leaving, but adapting to the changing layout. In the next 1 -2 years, CR Vanguard will lay out a more suitable address in Guangzhou, and will bring more upgraded new formats, and continue to be the companion of Guangzhou’s new life.