In December 2013, Li Ning ended his 23 year sponsorship of China’s national gymnastics team. During the interview, Li Ning himself was quite helpless: “gymnastics has trained me and gymnastics is a part of my life. However, as the president of the company, this is the choice I have to make [25].”
In that year, Li Ning, who was in crisis and turmoil, recorded a loss of 392 million yuan, senior executives changed blood and business lines were chaotic. What makes Li Ning feel like a thorn in his throat is that after half a year, Anta entered the Gymnastics Center as a new sponsor.
The ignition ceremony of the Olympic Games five years ago made the world know “Li Ning”, a sports brand from China. At that time, Xu Haifeng, the first gold medalist of the Olympic Games, Deng Yaping, the leader of table tennis, Liu Xiang and Yao Ming were all popular candidates. Zhang Yimou later explained the reasons for choosing Li Ning: the difficult movements in the ignition process require long-term training, and active athletes cannot be selected; Li Ning is a gymnastics legend and honor, and has become the best candidate.
Under the background of earthquake, snow disaster and financial crisis, the Beijing Olympic Games gave the whole of China a shot in the arm. For Li Ning, the three minutes that attracted worldwide attention over the bird’s nest also became a booster for Li Ning’s brand.
At that time, Li Ning had a 53.8% revenue growth in the previous year, punched Anta and stepped on the special step, and firmly sat down as the overlord of Chinese sports brands. Lighting the flame has become an unforgettable stroke in the history of the Olympic Games. After the ignition ceremony, Li Ning’s market value rushed to 50 billion, more than twice that of Anta. In front of them, there are only two global overlords, Nike and Adidas.
In the market territory of Chinese sports brands, there have always been two clear main lines: one is the Chinese brand represented by Li Ning Anta, which is fiercely competing with the two international giants Nike and Adidas; The other is the overt and covert struggle between Li Ning and Anta.
In 2003, Nike took the first place in the sales volume of Chinese sports brands from Li Ning. In 2004, Li Ning was greatly surpassed by Adidas again when the sales volume soared by 30%. In the same year, Li Ning internally formulated a secret plan: Surpassing Nike in the Chinese market in 15 years [20].
However, 17 years later, Nike and Adidas still firmly occupy the top two market shares of Chinese sports brands. On the contrary, Anta’s market value has expanded nearly 20 times since its listing in 2007, successfully surpassing Li Ning and becoming the first brother of domestic sports brands. Whether in terms of revenue or market value, Anta once opened the gap of Li Ning more than twice.
Everything is fixed in the summer when the Olympic flame was lit in 2008.
crisis: the foreshadowing of the Olympic Games
In 2004, with the conclusion of the Athens Olympic Games, the final preparations for the Beijing Olympic Games began. Zhang Zhiyong, then CEO of Li Ning, took part in the bidding of the official sponsor of the Beijing Olympic Games with the psychological price of 20% of the annual sales [21]. Whether it’s brand details or business achievements, Li Ning and the Olympic Games should be a perfect match.
There is a saying in the industry: under normal circumstances, with an investment of US $100 million, the popularity of the brand can be improved by 1%; Sponsoring the Olympic Games can increase this figure to 3%. Especially for sports brands, the Olympic Games is a golden marketing period that must not be missed [20].
Li Ning’s listing in 2004 has the factor of storing ammunition for Olympic marketing [21]. According to Li Ning’s calculation, the whole marketing expenditure will cost 80% of the sales of that year. However, in the bidding process, the wealthy Adidas offered twice the price, and Li Ning finally regretted [21].
It is a blessing in disguise that Li Ning’s own ignition ceremony at the bird’s nest and the company’s alternative marketing have enabled Li Ning to complete a dramatic anti killing of Adidas at the Olympic Games:
At the Beijing Olympic Games, Li Ning sponsored four Chinese advantageous events: gymnastics, diving, shooting and table tennis. The picture of Chinese players on the podium was played repeatedly with Li Ning’s logo. Similarly, the Spanish and Argentine men’s basketball teams wearing Li Ning ranked second and third respectively, brushing their sense of existence, while the Chinese men’s basketball team wearing Adidas stopped in the top 8.
CTR, a market research company, later conducted a survey: in the sportswear industry, 37.4% of people think Li Ning is an Olympic sponsor, while the recognition rate of Adidas, a real Olympic sponsor, is only 22.8% [20].
However, a crisis sweeping the whole industry also foreshadowed the attention of the world in the Olympic Games.
After Beijing’s successful Olympic bid in 2001, Chinese brands took advantage of the Olympic bonus to expand production and open stores to seize the share. In Jinjiang, Fujian Province, where factories are concentrated, there are even vendors hoarding soles and raising prices.
After the Olympic Games, the number of stores of the six domestic brands exceeded 5000, equivalent to more than 20 sports brand stores in each county in China [19]. At that time, the overall inventory sales ratio of sports shoes and clothing reached 50% – 60%, far higher than the controllable range of the garment industry by 10% – 20%, and the inventory risk began to be exposed.
When the crisis broke out in 2012, the inventory of the six domestic sports brands for half a year had exceeded the total inventory of the whole year in 2011. Even if all the factories stop production, the existing stock of sports shoes and clothing will be enough to sell for another three years. The discount clearing of inventory, which would not start until the end of the year, has just begun in the autumn.
The culprit of the mismatch between supply and demand lies in the “large wholesale model” that has prevailed in the garment industry for many years: from brands to consumers, they first pass through the primary dealers in the provincial region, and then distribute them to the secondary dealers in the municipal region, and sometimes the tertiary dealers at the county level, and then to the retail network.
The advantage of large wholesale mode is that it can meet the needs of rapid brand expansion in the rising period of the industry as a whole. But its disadvantages are also obvious: because the chain is too long, the changes on the demand side are difficult to be perceived by the upstream immediately.
In the absence of fine supply chain management, the transmission of decentralized terminal retail information lags behind. Even the products designed by the top designers may take a year from the factory to the window.
On the other hand, the brand company wholesales the goods to the agents. Even if the sales work is completed, the revenue and profit are included in the statement. Therefore, the real inventory backlog will be covered up by the theoretical data in the financial report.
For Li Ning, the moment when the Olympic torch was lit, together with the booming financial report, covered up the inventory pressure faced by the company. It was not until two years after the Olympic torch was extinguished that Li Ning’s vigorous flame began to show fatigue – in December 2010, Li Ning’s share price fell 23% one day due to the unexpected low orders at the ordering meeting.
What is more unacceptable to Li Ning is that in just two years, Anta’s market value has exceeded and far surpassed Li Ning. Li Ning’s dream once disclosed a detail. Anta’s coming from behind made Li Ning feel bitter. Li Ning, who has faded out of the company’s management, made an exception to attend a regular executive meeting and asked a question that can be recorded in the history of Li Ning’s development:
“Why can Jinjiang brand catch up with us in two or three years [4]?”
hesitation: the division in turbulence
Li Ning’s closest moment to the goal of “surpassing Nike in 15 years” is in the fifth year of setting the goal – 2009. With the brilliance of the Olympic Games, Li Ning surpassed Adidas and re stood in the second position of Chinese sports brand.
Behind this is Li Ning’s finishing touch at the bird’s nest, but the hero behind the scenes belongs to then CEO Zhang Zhiyong. In 2001, Li Ning and Chen Yihong, the two soul figures of Li Ning, faded out of the company. Zhang Zhiyong, who took over, invited IBM and Roland Berger to make strategic planning, bought SAP ERP software and formed a new team with top 500 professional managers. In the second year, Li Ning’s sales exceeded 1 billion.
In Zhang Zhiyong’s plan, Li Ning should become an international brand from 2009. Because for them, the 2008 Olympic Games is a once-in-a-lifetime window to show themselves to the outside world, and Li Ning did. Perhaps it is precisely because of the unexpected success of Olympic marketing that foreshadows the frustration behind.
In 2009, Zhang Zhiyong comprehensively reshaped Li Ning’s brand in order to achieve internationalization and high-end: he changed the “squirrel tail” logo into a “fashionable herringbone”, slogan changed from “everything is possible” to “make the change”, and the product price began to connect with Nike.
The successful revenge on Adidas is undoubtedly the catalyst for Li Ning’s ambition: Paul zadoff, general manager of shoe product system who changed jobs from Nike, slashed almost all SKUs with a unit price of less than 299 yuan and replaced them with products with higher prices [4]. Zhang Zhiyong believes that relying on a large-scale distribution network is unsustainable, and Chinese brands need to move towards the high end in order to break through the ceiling.
The strategic judgment of taking the high-end route is not wrong, but in order to make a sensation, Li Ning kept the brand upgrade strictly confidential and did not fully notify the factory until the eve of the press conference. As a result, the newly produced products have become old inventory overnight. Dealers are in danger, and ordering will be Waterloo, which will further aggravate the inventory pressure.
Li Ning’s sales advantage over Adidas was only maintained for one year, and was surpassed by the latter again. To make matters worse, also in 2009, Anta signed a four-year sponsorship contract with the Chinese Olympic Committee – in the eyes of many people, Li Ning should be a brand more representative of China.
In 2010, although Li Ning’s revenue was still above Anta, its profit was exceeded by Anta (HK $1551 million and HK $1108 million). Anta has only 1 / 2 of Li Ning’s in terms of the average inventory turnover days, average accounts receivable turnover days and average accounts payable turnover days. This is the core factor that Anta can achieve anti excess in market value.
Ding Shizhong, Anta’s CEO, publicly pointed out the problems of the “large wholesale model” for the first time in 2010 and required Anta to complete the retail transformation within 3-5 years.
Inventory backlog is very common in the field of consumer retail. One way is to form a stronger interest binding relationship with dealers, and the two sides share the inventory pressure together. The typical representative is Gree and ” Better Life Commercial Chain Share Co.Ltd(002251) ” company; Another way is to drastically shut down excess capacity – Anta will cancel multi-level distribution and directly set up a sales and operation Department, which will face the market, and the shopkeeper can place orders directly to the headquarters.
In this way, Anta reduced the inventory sales ratio from 5:1 to 4:1, while Li Ning’s inventory sales ratio was still 7:1 in the same period. In the first half of 2011, Anta lost 136 million yuan of inventory, twice that of Li Ning in the same period. In June 2013, Ding Shizhong told the outside world that the excess inventory had been basically digested.
In addition to the poor response to inventory, Li Ning is also timid in marketing: Although Li Ning is the first Chinese brand to sign an NBA star, Li Ning did not follow up when Anta and peak took out more budgets to smash the NBA [4]. Li Ning once planned to invest resources in the field of football, but when he signed the Premier League club, Li Ning chose to search for gold in the Chinese League.
As described in Li Ning’s dream, Zhang Zhiyong, who was born in finance, the overall principle of sponsorship is “cost performance”. On the other hand, Zhang Zhiyong doesn’t understand the sports market – Li Ning approached Yao Ming in 2010 and tried to build Yao Ming like Nike Jordan series, but in fact, Yao Ming just experienced the most serious injury in his career and retired a year later [4].
In 2010, Li Ning spent his 20th birthday in a stormy situation, and many managers who had been airborne for less than a year left one after another. In 2011, Li Ning’s profit dropped sharply from 1.1 billion yuan to 386 million yuan. In the following three years, Li Ning lost a total of 3.1 billion yuan.
Although Li Ning has realized the problem at this time, time is not on their side. In 2011, Li Ning examined Anta as a leader for the last time, but the distance between the two is very close. A year later, Anta’s revenue exceeded Li Ning for the first time, and the gap became larger and larger in the following years.
In the same year, Li Ning announced Zhang Zhiyong’s departure with a paper announcement and brought a new successor: Korean American Jin Zhenjun.
differentiation: the gap opened
For Li Ning in 2012, Jin Zhenjun is the most suitable candidate. The dilemma of the former is that buildings are going to collapse, and the specialty of the latter is to turn the tide.
In 2002, Jin Zhenjun, general manager of Dell Korea, increased Dell Korea’s performance tenfold in four years when the top three competitors accounted for 60%. In 2009, Daphne failed to invest in the e-commerce platform, and its share price fell to less than HK $3. Jin Zhenjun led the TPG team to settle in, making Daphne the first successful shoe company in the world.
When he came to Li Ning as a reformer, Jin Zhenjun tried his best to promote Li Ning to shift from dealer mode to retail direct sales, and the number of Direct stores increased from 631 in 2012 to 1202 in 2014. However, due to the failure of the strategy of reducing prices and clearing inventory, Li Ning had to choose a hard landing. He spent 1.8 billion yuan to buy the inventory in the hands of channel providers, and the book loss reached 2 billion yuan that year.
Another action is to stop bleeding: under the rule of Zhang Zhiyong, Li Ning has successively incorporated sports fashion brand lotto, badminton brand Kason and table tennis brand Hongshuangxi, and incubated sub brand Xindong (Z-DO). During Jin Zhenjun’s tenure, most of these brands were forced to cut down because of huge financial pressure.
Lotto was once highly expected within Li Ning. During the 2008 Olympic Games, Li Ning spent nearly 1 billion yuan to buy Lotto’s 20-year franchise in China, but the fact is that kappa blocked the sports fashion track at that time, and lotto, which had been losing money for three years, became a financial black hole.
Kappa’s ups and downs are more like a cruel joke to Li Ning. In 2002, Lining got the Kappa’s 5 years’ agency in Chinese mainland, but in 2005 he transferred all the shares of Kappa agent to Beijing’s old comrade Lining, who had already left the management level.
It is said that Li Ning listened to the suggestion of Roland Berger, a consulting firm, to divest kappa. The latter believed that Li Ning only bought the management right in the 1950s, not the ownership. A bad operation is not good for the company. A good operation is to support his competitors.
But I didn’t expect that at the end of 2005, kappa’s parent company basicnet encountered cash flow problems and transferred kappa’s brand ownership and permanent management right in mainland China and Macao to Chen Yihong at a low price. Subsequently, kappa prospered by relying on the sports fashion route.
Ironically, Li Ning later invested heavily in lotto, and his biggest motivation was to hope that it could become a sports fashion brand that kept pace with kappa.
The general view of the market is that, in addition to inventory pressure and internal shocks, Li Ning has long pursued the positioning of a “comprehensive category” for the main brand, but they neither have enough financial resources to sponsor all mainstream sports like Nike, nor can they insist on maintaining marketing expenses in a segment for a long time. Although Anta will also encounter this problem, Anta is more fully prepared for the inventory crisis and has not raised prices rashly.
In 2009, Anta acquired FILA, an Italian sports brand with serious losses from Belle group, trying to make a breakthrough in the high-end market. In 2013, with the elimination of the impact of the inventory crisis, Anta began to spare energy to plan the development path of FILA, fully implement direct retail, and the group directly controlled the decoration, service and sales data of stores. On some SKUs, FILA is even priced higher than Nike.
In the period when kappa was dragged down by the inventory crisis of the whole industry, FILA caught up with the trend of athleisure (sports and leisure) with the help of DTC strategy. For a long time after 2010, FILA was once the only card holder of the track and turned losses into profits in Anta’s hands. The performance was so good that the muddy water keen to short Chinese companies could not believe it and issued three short reports in a row.
In 2020, FILA surpassed Anta’s main brand revenue for the first time. Compared with the main brand’s gross profit margin of about 50%, FILA’s gross profit margin has always exceeded 70%.
In the stage of Anta relying on FILA to build the second growth curve, Jin Zhenjun, trapped in financial blood loss, can only continue to shrink the front, cut expenses and focus on the main brand of Li Ning.
By 2015, Li Ning was struggling to turn losses into profits, while Jin Zhenjun left office a year ago. Compared with Zhang Zhiyong, Jin Zhenjun can find both ways. Jin Zhenjun uses more drastic means to parachute senior executives and make drastic adjustments to the structure. But public opinion has made an unseemly conclusion to his radical reform: a huge loss of $3 billion in two years.
What is waiting for Li Ning Company is not the next professional manager, but Li Ning, who has been away from the front line of management for nearly 20 years.
essence: the secret of multi brand
In 2015, Li Ning, who returned to the company’s management, changed the slogan back to “everything is possible”, and rapidly increased the proportion of e-commerce channels from 5% to 25% ~ 30%. Until this time, the aftermath of the inventory crisis was really solved. In 2018, Li Ning launched a new sub brand “China Li Ning”.
This time, time and luck finally stood on Li Ning’s side. “China Li Ning” bet on the national trend and became popular at New York Fashion week. Subsequently, the flagship store of “China Li Ning” was launched nationwide, and the store efficiency was three times that of ordinary Li Ning stores. In 2019, Li Ning achieved an overall performance growth of 200%.
However, from a commercial perspective, the “structural gap” between Li Ning and Anta has not been solved. The difference between the two can also be found in the story of Adidas and Nike.
Nike’s most famous case is that it signed an exclusive contract with Jordan and gave birth to the air jordan series of basketball shoes. It has independent logo, independent design team, independent store logo and higher pricing. If this brand is independent, it will be the fifth largest sneaker company in the world.
Nike positions its main brand as a professional sports brand, and in each market segment, Nike will directly acquire mature brands and incorporate them into its own product line.
For example, the ice hockey brand Bauer acquired in 1994 covers two sports: hockey and ice hockey; In 2002, it acquired Hurley, a brand of extreme sports equipment. In 2003, Nike spent $305 million to copy the bottom of converse, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, becoming another cash abortion product line. In this process, Nike continues to sell less than expected brands, leaving high cash flow brands.
The core of this multi brand strategy is to distinguish different brands and cover different consumer groups through price bands and use scenarios. Although adidas has created three sub brands: adidas performance (Sports Performance Series), Adidas originals (Sports Classic Series) and Adidas NEO (Sports Leisure Series), they are difficult to distinguish from the main brands, and none of them can become an air jordan.
In 2006, the ambitious Adidas spent $3.8 billion to buy Reebok, a century old store, pointing to Nike’s headquarters in the U.S. market. Until today, this is the largest acquisition in the field of sports brands.
However, Reebok’s problem is that its brand positioning is extremely coincident with Adidas. Its sports categories such as football, baseball, football and track and field are also Adidas’s basic plate. Reebok can only make way for the main brand and hand over the three performance chips of NBA, WNBA Jersey sponsorship and NHL sponsorship to Adidas.
Then Reebok was forced to turn to the field of professional fitness, but here it met a strong rival – lululemon, the largest dark horse in the sports market in recent ten years.
Earlier this year, Adidas sold Reebok at a low price, saying the acquisition was “an expensive mistake”. Today, the distance between Nike and Adidas can hold three puma.
Single brand and multi brand, and the resulting competitive pattern, are essentially determined by the characteristics of this industry:
(1) The core of sports shoes and clothing lies in functionality, which needs to rely on to shape brand cognition. The brand needs to form a “binding relationship” with a certain kind of sports. Nike is for jogging, Reebok is for basketball, lululemon is for yoga, and Helen Hansen is for skiing, forming the effect of “thinking of a certain sport, thinking of a certain brand”.
(2) It is difficult for a single brand to cover multiple vertical motion scenes. A mountaineering enthusiast would rather choose Scarpa or kayland’s professional mountaineering shoes than some mountaineering shoes launched by Nike. Even lululemon, which is slowly moving towards pan marketing, bound the group of Yoga coaches in the early stage.
(3) From big to strong, the core of enterprises is to find the “second growth curve” through acquisition. Sports brands need to rely on top athletes to carry out marketing, but the frequency of important events is low, coupled with the short golden age, top athletes are a scarce resource comparable to giant pandas. If a single brand wants to develop across the track, it is far easier to acquire another ready-made brand and then differentiate with other brands.
After acquiring converse, Nike consciously brought converse closer to the fashion line, drew a clear line with Nike and Air Jordan, and sold Umbro, a football shoe brand similar to Nike’s positioning. The problem with Adidas is the acquisition of Reebok, which is essentially buying another Adidas at a high price.
Anta’s success lies in that FILA and Anta’s main brands are high and low, which just stuck in different purchasing power markets and solved Anta’s urgent desire for the high-end market at that time. In 2018, Anta made another move and acquired Amer sports with outdoor brand Archaeopteryx, tennis brand Wilson, fitness brand Precor and skiing brand atomic, which cut into several subdivided sports scenes.
Li Ning’s problem is that in the stage of multi brand incubation, Li Ning caught up with the company’s management out of control, and the financial blood loss for many years has forced Li Ning to shrink back to the main brand front. During Jin Zhenjun’s tenure, Li Ning hopes to position the brand in the five core categories of basketball, running, badminton, training and sports life [25], and hopes to cover multiple categories with a single brand. However, no matter which category, Li Ning is difficult to compete for marketing resources with rich and powerful rivals.
Even if the counterattack momentum in recent years is like a rainbow, Li Ning’s strategy can be summarized in two words: price rise. After the New York Fashion Week, the average price of Li Ning’s Enlightenment 2-ace-wade’s way ordinary model rose from 899 to 1700 yuan, and the LEGO model once reached 5000 yuan [27].
Therefore, Li Ning finally realized the high-end positioning in this way, but the goal of “surpassing Nike” seems to be getting worse and worse. A series of turbulence after the Olympic Games affected all aspects of the company all the time in the next decade.
Whether Zhang Zhiyong, Jin Zhenjun or Li Ning himself, they may not be able to predict their role in it.
end
It is said that there was a well-known joke in Li Ning Company [26]: once the front desk of the company didn’t recognize Li Ning and stopped him at the door. The gymnastics prince with white temples could only explain, “I work here.”
Li Ning’s positioning is more inclined to athletes than entrepreneurs. Even the original intention of Li Ning’s brand is mostly inspired by Li Jingwei. The impression he left to consumers was more a legend in the sports world than the chairman of Li Ning company.
In 2015, Lin Dan, almost synonymous with Chinese badminton, accepted the sponsorship of Japanese brand UNIX, while Li Ning was the equipment sponsor of the national badminton team and had the right to resort to legal means. Later, Li Ning himself responded under the questioning of the media: as an athlete, he can understand Lin Dan [30].
Inside the company, Li Ning has a very high reputation, but this often means that Li Ning lacks the ruthlessness and decisiveness of businessmen more or less. He rarely expressed Li Ning’s business ambitions, but hoped that Li Ning could become a “sports brand that inspires the Chinese people”.
Whether in the most turbulent period of the company in 2010 or the succession of the new professional manager Qian Wei in 2019, Li Ning hopes that the company can slowly realize “De Li Ning”. But in fact, even in more than ten years away from the front line of management, Li Ning has always been the soul of the company, and it is Li Ning who finally pulled the company out of the quagmire.
For such a company, it may be difficult for us to simply examine its success or failure from a commercial perspective. After all, in that era of crossing the river by touching the stone, Li Ning inspired a whole generation of Chinese people with 14 World Gymnastics champions and 3 heavy Olympic gold medals.
In 2017, Li Ning participated in the “reader” program of China Central Television and read Ba Jin’s prose entitled “being a soldier” with a strong Guangxi accent.
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(interface News)
