First of all, “small and beautiful” is time-limited, or in other words, has a shelf life. Many people view “small” from the perspective of the enterprise, but I think it should be viewed from the perspective of the market. Many market segments are considered unimportant because few people pay attention to them or they have rarely received attention before, but in fact their user demand or user scale is very large. Next, let’s talk about “beauty”. In this field, the market is in the initial stage of development. Whether it is the needs of customers or our peers or competitors, they are all in the stage of rapid development or growth. Under such a background, the “small and beautiful” market naturally creates “small and beautiful” enterprises.
As for the future development of “small and beautiful” enterprises, the future development space of “small and beautiful” enterprises is huge. First, it is now the initial stage of cross-border e-commerce. To give a simple example, domestic e-commerce has been developing since the beginning of 2000, and it has been ten to fifteen years. 10%~15% of the total consumption comes from online sales. Now if we look at the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, the annual export volume is more than 10 trillion yuan, and the total cross-border export volume in 2015 is only more than 50 billion US dollars. So there is a lot of room for potential growth. This is the first.
In addition, we can see that there are many traditional industries and retail industries in the supply chain, as well as very senior brands or experts. In fact, they have not yet touched cross-border e-commerce. With their participation and the improvement of the cross-border e-commerce industry system, more “small and beautiful” enterprises will emerge.
But then again, the cross-border e-commerce industry has been developing for more than ten years. For example, LightInTheBox has a history of nearly ten years. As more and more people join in such competition, it means that the requirements for “small and beautiful” enterprises will become higher and higher. If “small and beautiful” enterprises just want to simply take advantage of the platform, or take advantage of the dividends of multiple platforms, it may be difficult to continue to be “beautiful” in the future, and may become smaller and smaller. Only if you have core competitiveness, in the supply side, logistics side, or marketing side, will you have a living space. In the four points of traffic, logistics, supply, and long-term repurchase, “small and beautiful” enterprises must do at least one thing very well, otherwise it will be difficult to continue. Overall, I think the hope is very good, but the requirements are also very high.
From our own past experience, the most critical point of the development of “small and beautiful” is the product, because you will find that only the product is eternal, whether it is a new product, a good product, or a product with the highest cost performance. Whether it is a traffic dividend or an increasing dividend, it will eventually return to the product. Looking at the domestic situation, we know that when the domestic traffic cost gradually becomes higher than the offline cost, what kind of enterprises will eventually emerge? Enterprises with good products. So whether it is “small and beautiful” or “big and strong”, products are the top priority and can never be discarded.