Shoe Enterprises Are Dragged Down By Inventory Problems And BELLE International Keeps Growing

Under the overall slowdown of market growth, in the four major women's shoes giants that have already been listed, apart from the steady growth of BELLE international, several other businesses have been dragging down their performance growth due to inventory problems, and the increase of proprietary products has become the direction of spanformation for all major shoe companies.

Self run trend

China's second largest and middle grade Women's Shoes Retailers announced in a semi annual report that they will continue to reduce OEM business in the year to allocate more capacity for proprietary products, and plan to increase the production line to 16, which will increase the capacity of the group to 72 million pairs of shoes by the end of 2012.

It will also open new stores and expand online businesses. In the second half of 2012, it will open about 100 self operated retail stores and some 50 third party retail stores, while continuing to work with third party suppliers to expand the online platform.

In terms of retail revenue in 2011, it ranks fourth in China's high-end footwear market. In the first half of this year, the total realized income was 1 billion 130 million yuan, and the operating profit was 190 million yuan, representing an increase of 21.8% and 5.2% respectively over the same period last year. The profit attributable to the company owner was 140 million yuan, up 7.2% over the same period last year.

Strengthening self-management is not the direction of a thousand degrees a shoe enterprise, from the recent Daphne international and franchisee's dispute, Daphne to join the strategy is also obvious.

Daphne clearly stated: "self operated channel is the main direction of future expansion. At this stage, no new application will be accepted." This can also be corroborated from earnings data: as of June 30th this year, Daphne had 4598 Direct stores and 1010 franchised stores, and 411 new outlets in the first half of this year, reducing 45 stores. The proportion of Direct stores increased from 81% at the end of 2011 to 83%.

Daphne semi annual report also showed that in the first half of the year, the number of stores in the four to six tier cities increased from 145 to 3170, while the proportion of sales of the core brands in the four to six line cities was 53.12%.

Inventory problem

The reason why these shoe companies constantly adjust their channel structure is because of the general problems facing inventory industry.

Saturday is the most typical in terms of inventory. Although revenue grew 22.4% to 742 million yuan over the same period, operating profit fell 16.4% to 64 million yuan, and net profit attributable to the parent company also fell 16.7% to 48 million yuan over the same period. Net profit fell 28.95% in the second quarter of this year, a further decline in the first quarter.

Although the electricity supplier channel as an important means of clearing stocks, but the company's net stock increased by 107 million yuan, an increase of 12.44% over the same period, the inventory turnover times of 0.91, lower than the same period last year and the beginning of the level (0.99, 0.94).

In addition, state securities Textile and garment industry Researcher Zhang Bin (micro-blog) analyzed in his research report that Saturday's investment in sub brands and new brands such as Sophia and Fei Bai Li also continuously increased the inventory pressure of enterprises. Among them, one year (accounting for 72%), one to two years (accounting for 19%), and more than two years (9%) accounted for 12.36%, 25.66% and -12.69% respectively, compared with the beginning of the year, while the net cash flow generated by the first half of the company's activities was -1131 million, down by -163.52% compared with the same period last year.

Besides performance, Saturday's channel expansion rate is also less than expected. In the first half of the year, the number of stores increased by only 12. CICC analyzed in the research report, "the income growth situation caused by the expansion of stores in the previous two years is not ideal, but it has caused cost pressure to the company. So this year, the company has been more cautious in opening stores, and has shut down many old shops with poor performance. In addition to the growth of stores caused by heap shoe making, it is estimated that the net number of stores will be lower than the original 120~130 stores.

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Similarly, for Daphne, which dominated the street store strategy, although it avoided the "killing" in the shopping malls and famous brands, the average stock turnover days in the first half increased from 149 days to 202 days, and the inventory turnover days in the first half of the year were as high as 239 days.

BELLE mode

For BELLE international, a leading enterprise, the first half of the year is an adverse market growth. Revenue and net profit increased by 15% and 12% respectively, and gross margin remained 57%. In the second quarter, the same store sales growth returned to 10.5%, and net profit was 2 billion 242 million yuan, becoming the highest net profit retailer in the footwear industry.

In terms of inventory, although the total turnover period increased by 2.9 days compared with 2011, the turnover period of footwear business was reduced by 1.6 days. This has been fairly well controlled in the industry.

Many apparel industry researchers told reporters that the reason why BELLE can maintain a healthy high margin is due to proprietary shops and proprietary brands.

Because BELLE itself is a high-end positioning, it has a higher brand premium. BELLE not only has more than 10 private brands such as BELLE, Teenmix and TATA. In addition to the business of fashion women's shoes, another important business of BELLE is international brand. Athletic Wear Decorating agents, such as Bata, Geox, Clarks, Mephisto, BCBG, ELLE, Merrell and Caterpillar, and many other domestic brands, are so many brands that BELLE has a strong voice in the shopping malls.

In the first half of this year alone, the income was 5 billion 780 million yuan, the gross profit margin was about 37%, which was half of the gross price of women's shoes, while the income from Nike and Adidas accounted for 85%.

In the first half of this year, BELLE also opened direct stores, opened 752 stores in the first half, and added 262 new sports apparel sales outlets. Up to the end of June, the number of self operated stores in the mainland increased by 20.4% to 11022.

BELLE International reported that it will spend 880 million yuan to acquire "Big Step Limited". After successful takeover, it will have synergy with other businesses and enhance profitability. BELLE Group expects Big Step to bring nearly 2 billion yuan of revenue a year.

However, BELLE CEO and executive director Sheng Bai pepper has publicly said that the second half of this year is not optimistic, the company may increase the discount intensity.

Zhang Bin also predicted that the market will remain unchanged in the second half of the year, and the relevant financial indicators such as inventory need to wait for the market and company to improve.