Recently, there has been bad news from fresh e-commerce tracks. On January 12, according to phoenix.com technology report, on the eve of listing in Hong Kong, meicai.com was blasted to relocate its headquarters and lay off 40%, and one of its employees said that meicai.com was laying off staff all the time. Coincidentally, Ding Dong, another fresh e-commerce player, is also said to have been laid off on a large scale. According to Sina Technology News, some employees said that compared with the peak period, the company had tens of thousands of people less. However, Ding Dong responded that the information was untrue, without factual basis and rigorous data sources, and individual job changes of the company were normal organizational resource adjustments. However, looking at the fresh e-commerce over the past year, "burning money", "financing" and even "bankruptcy" have become indelible labels. The daily excellent fresh listed in US stocks had a net loss of 3.017 billion yuan in the first three quarters of 2021, and the net loss of dingdong buying vegetables in the same period also reached 5.333 billion yuan. The two listed front warehouses suffered heavy losses, and the remaining waist and tail players without the support of giants declared bankruptcy and withdrew from the competition after they had no way to replenish blood, such as fresh fruit, life on the same journey and dead radish. Some analysts believe that the main difficulty faced by the fresh e-commerce market lies in the difficulty of profitability. On the one hand, the increase of customer unit price has reached the bottleneck, on the other hand, the existing supply chain model has encountered difficulties in further reducing costs. At present, the fresh e-commerce track has not run out of the real winner. American food and Ding Dong's shopping have fallen into the storm of layoffs The fresh e-commerce industry, which began to be cold in the second half of last year, has heard news of layoffs from time to time. This time, it is American food and dingdong shopping. According to reports, suspected employees of meicai.com broke the news on the social platform. After the last 50% layoffs, Meicai Beijing headquarters laid off another 40% of its staff. In addition, the headquarters of meicai.com, which was originally located in Beijing Wangfujing Yintai shopping mall, has been moved near the Beijing railway station. A former American food network worker said that American food network has been laying off staff. Some time ago, it laid off some business directors and product directors. In early September last year, the interface reported that meicai.com had layoffs and business scope contraction, its Chengdu R & D center was abolished as a whole, and 50% or more layoffs were made in technical departments such as product R & D, business departments such as procurement and sales, and functional departments such as finance of Beijing headquarters. The personnel involved include not only new employees, but also middle and senior managers of secondary department heads and above, "some departments only leave one leader". At the same time, an internal e-mail showed that, corresponding to layoffs, the business contraction of meicai.com was carried out simultaneously, some urban services were shut down and large regions were merged. At that time, meicai.com responded that the company would carry out normal organizational adjustment and Optimization in the past, present and future, continuously improve organizational efficiency and professional ability, and all business cities of Meicai were operating normally. For the recent layoff rumors, meicai.com did not respond, but the news showed that the company was preparing to go public. On January 12, some media reported that meicai.com had decided to apply for listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and was expected to submit the form publicly in the first half of 2022. It is reported that meicai.com has appointed CICC, Citigroup and Nomura to be responsible for the listing, and it is estimated to raise US $300-500 million (about HK $2.34-3.9 billion). Tianyancha shows that meicai.com has had eight rounds of financing since 2014, with a cumulative financing amount of more than US $1.25 billion. The most recent one was round e and above in October 2018, with an amount of US $600 million and a corresponding valuation of about US $7 billion. The investors are tiger Global Fund and Hillhouse capital. Since then, meicai.com has not announced public financing again. In the middle and late 2019, some media reported that the new round of financing of meicai.com failed and the capital chain was tight, but it was denied by its founder and CEO Liu Chuanjun. It has not received public financing for more than three years, and the transformation of meicai.com for many times is not optimistic. From the perspective of business model, American dishes that focus on asset self-management can't compete with internet giants such as meituan and pinduoduo at end C, and players such as meituan fast donkey and haidilaoshuhai continue to join at end B. The industry expects that after the departure of several executives and the failure of C-end business selling to jd.com, meicai.com may impact the capital market and seek blood supplement. Ding Dong, who has been listed to buy vegetables, has not escaped the fate of layoffs or "organizational adjustment". On June 29, 2021, after the fund-raising amount was reduced by more than 70%, Ding Dong bought vegetables and landed on the New York Stock Exchange. On the second day of listing, the share price once rushed to $46, but it has been "halved" compared with the issue price of $23.50. As of January 13, before the U.S. stock market, Ding Dong's share price closed at $11.32, with a market value of $2.672 billion. Behind the sharp decline in market value, Ding Dong has been in a state of substantial loss. According to the financial report disclosed in November last year, the company's revenue in the third quarter of 2021 was 6.19 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 111%; However, the net loss was as high as 2.01 billion yuan, compared with 829 million yuan in the same period last year. If you look at it for a long time, Ding Dong's accumulated loss in three years has exceeded 10 billion. In 2019, the net loss was 1.87 billion yuan, while in 2020, the net loss was 3.18 billion yuan; In the three quarters of 2021, the net losses were RMB 1.38 billion, RMB 1.94 billion and RMB 2.01 billion respectively. After the financial report, in December 2021, the news of layoffs came out when Ding Dong bought vegetables. Some employees said that the proportion of layoffs in core departments such as procurement, algorithm and technology ranged from 20% to 50%. At that time, the company responded that individual changes were a small-scale adjustment of normal organizational resources. However, recently, there are more and more news about the company's layoffs. According to sina science and technology, an employee certified as dingdong shopping revealed on social media that dingdong shopping has started layoffs, with 50% procurement, 30% algorithm, 30% operation and 10% - 20% recruitment. Among the layoffs, employees in the probationary period have become the hardest hit areas. "The probationary period is 6 months, and they start layoffs in the last month. They also want to try not to give compensation." Under the layoffs of several posts, some internal employees said that the company had lost tens of thousands of people. In addition, they also forced the employees of the front warehouse service station to take unpaid leave. In this regard, on January 13, Ding Dong responded that individual job changes belong to the company's normal organizational resource adjustment, and the business is running normally at present. At the same time, there is no mandatory unpaid leave for front-line employees. Usually, it will be adjusted reasonably according to the work situation of the site, especially the wishes and work intensity of employees. However, some commentators said that after denying layoffs, Ding Dong still faces core torture when buying vegetables. How long will he lose? A new round of shuffle kicked off Compared with layoffs and business contraction, the outcome of fresh e-commerce players who have exited is more tragic. On October 20, 2021, Daitou app issued a shutdown announcement. The announcement shows that since Anhui vegetable e-commerce Co., Ltd. finally failed to introduce restructuring investors, the vegetable company will stop business from now on, stay radish app will stop providing services to consumers, all offline stores will stop business and will be closed in the near future. "Our expectations and demand for growth are too high, and we underestimate the speed of burning fresh food, resulting in excessive consumption. This is where we use it wrong." Li Yang, founder of dairadish, reflected that the company fell on the issue of financing. It is understood that from January 23, 2020, dairadish entered the bankruptcy reorganization procedure. After nearly 21 months of struggle, the company stopped all procurement, sales, payment, revenue and other businesses and tried to introduce new investors, but it still went to a halt in the end. Earlier in July 2021, Tongcheng life, once valued at US $1 billion, had to declare bankruptcy because "due to poor management, it was still unable to get rid of the operating difficulties despite efforts from many parties". In addition, orange heart preferred to shrink in a large area, Shihui group fell into the crisis of layoffs and closure, and "Youcai", its B2B food distribution platform, stopped operating for five months. Among the remaining players, there are fresh brands of Internet giants such as Ali, pinduoduo and meituan, and survivors such as dingdong shopping and daily excellent fresh. But it's not easy for survivors. The prelude to a new shuffle has begun. At the end of last year, Alibaba's box horse fresh offered a "cut nail price" in Shanghai, the base of dingdong's shopping, which was interpreted by the industry as "declaring war on dingdong's shopping". It is reported that the price reduction of HEMA covers 59 HEMA fresh stores, 21 HEMA Mini stores and users in the surrounding HEMA coverage areas in Shanghai, and the activity continues until the end of the year. The screenshot from the outgoing circle of friends shows that Liang Changlin, founder and CEO of dingdong shopping, shouted across the air, saying that he was active in the battle. "The second child's biggest dream is to fight with the boss.". Box horse fresh aspect but external response, "cut nail" price is not "cut Ding", just feedback to consumers, cut price firmly. Hou Yi, President of HEMA business group, also said in the wechat circle of friends that since its establishment, HEMA has never had a price war and has always pursued a value war. In the face of fierce competition in many formats of the fresh food industry, HEMA also has the ability of price war. According to the analysis of insiders, under the unspoken rule of "the leftover is the king" in the era of consumer Internet, fresh e-commerce can not escape the fate of price war and burning money for traffic before finding a more suitable way to play, which is also one of the factors that the whole industry has suffered repeated losses. Cheng Qi, an analyst at toubao Research Institute, believes that after this round of price war, fresh e-commerce players will reflect on whether the existing supply chain model is feasible and whether the existing business strategy violates the original intention of fresh e-commerce. The direct result is that a number of enterprises will fall down, and the development focus of the industry will return to the essence of better serving consumers and meeting consumer needs. However, it is embarrassing that after the cold financing market, it may be unsustainable for some players to burn money for a long time. Statistics show that most industry participants have limited "hematopoietic" ability. According to the statistics of China e-commerce research center, there are about 4000 entrants in the field of domestic fresh e-commerce, of which only 4% have flat revenue, 88% fall into loss, and finally only 1% achieve profit. Taking dingdong, who ranks among the first echelons, as an example, in the Q3 financial report of 2021, the company's book capital accumulated to 6.817 billion yuan, excluding the short-term investment part, the remaining cash and cash was only 3.098 billion yuan, but corresponding to the payment in current liabilities was 2.797 billion yuan, the short-term loan was 2.718 billion yuan, the salary and welfare payable was 208 million yuan, and the liability in operating lease part was 841 million yuan. This also means that after paying employees' wages and suppliers' payment, Ding Dong has little spare power to subsidize and fight a price war. Actively try to get closer to profitability "It's not difficult for fresh e-commerce to just burn money to increase scale, but it doesn't make any sense. In the elimination of 10 billion to 100 billion, it will be more and more difficult for players whose business can't achieve profitable growth." In April 2020, an internal letter from Xu Zheng, founder of daily Youxian, pointed directly to the pain points of the industry. Nevertheless, after several rounds of fierce battles in the early stage, the existing players have accumulated in logistics and supply chain infrastructure construction, brand construction and customer acquisition, but no enterprise has entered a stable profit period. There are many reasons. For example, the natural high loss rate and non standardization of fresh products, the gross profit of taking vegetables is already low, and they have to be redistributed at the end, which naturally increases the cost; In addition, consumer price sensitivity, bottlenecks in the improvement of customer unit price and other factors determine that fresh e-commerce is a very difficult business to make money. According to the financial report of dingdong shopping, the gross profit margin of 2021q3 company is 18.2%, but the comprehensive expense rate in the same period is 50.9%, corresponding to the performance cost per unit of Gmv is 0.33 yuan. Therefore, in the third quarterly report, Ding Dong proposed a strategic shift to buy vegetables, which became "excellent efficiency"