BELLE Shifts From High-End Department Stores To Mass Market And E-Commerce.

Everyone has to wear shoes, but the heavy style is still practical. It depends on how much money we have in our pocket.

Therefore, shoes have become the weathervane of consumer spending.

China's shoe sales are about $40 billion a year, equivalent to the export of shoes.

Such a high demand has supported the stock prices of Chinese shoe companies such as BELLE (Belle) and Daphne (Daphne).

BELLE, whose market capitalization has reached US $15 billion, will release its earnings this week, while its rival, a smaller Daphne, released its earnings on Monday.

In the long run, with the increase of income and the acceleration of urbanization, the demand for Chinese shoes is promising.

But in the short term, there are differences in the development prospects of BELLE and Daphne.

BELLE's brand, which sounds like European brand BELLE and Tata to Staccato (Staccato), has become one of the most popular brands among Chinese consumers.

But BELLE's sales are heavily dependent on department stores in big cities, and sales growth in this channel has slowed down.

As a result, the growth rate of BELLE's same store sales (SameStoreSales) fell to 8% in the fourth quarter of last year, more than half the increase in the first 3 quarters of last year.

By contrast, 70% of Daphne's sales come from independent stores in small and medium-sized cities in China, and its sales growth in this sector is faster than the national average.

This has kept Daphne's same store sales at an annual growth rate of 25%.

This explains why the number of Daphne storefronts increased by 1/6, so that its sales in 2011 increased by nearly 1/3, while the number of BELLE stores increased by 1/4, and sales growth was expected to be smaller than that of Daphne.

According to Nomura, by 2015, the number of millions of shoe stores in China's small and medium-sized cities will increase by 60%, an increase of two times that of the first tier cities, and Daphne still has plenty of room for further growth.

BELLE needs to do more to prove to investors that it is shifting from high-end department stores to mass market and e-commerce.

Only then will the market think that BELLE's earnings per class earnings (19 times) Be Daphne is 1/5 higher than that.