CEO Pan Ning In China -- On The Philosophy Of Speeding Up The Expansion Of UNIQLO

On 2014's "double 11" Tmall shopping carnival, Uniqlo Ranking 260 million yuan in the sales category of clothing enterprises in the first category. This marks the victory of the online market of UNIQLO as the leading brand of China's fast fashion, and the expansion of UNIQLO in China is accelerating.

As the CEO of Greater China, UNIQLO, penning I got up very early and went into the office at 6 a.m. to attend the meeting with headquarters. At every Monday's regular meeting, he will take charge of summarizing the last week's sales volume and formulating the core commodities strategy of the week, so that we can arrange the shops in the national stores punctually on Tuesday morning. Pan Ning has been working in UNIQLO for 20 years, but he remains "fresh" about this job. Nowadays, the key words of UNIQLO's zero inventory, basic funds, database management and so on are constantly recognized by the market and consumers. Pan Ning's vision of China's future is becoming clearer.

As of the end of fiscal year 2014 (August 31, 2014), UNIQLO's total number of stores in the Greater China region reached 374. Pan Ning once revealed that UNIQLO will open stores in China at the rate of 80~100 development every year. According to the data in 2013, UNIQLO opened 82 entity stores in China, more than 62 of the fast fashion brands H&M, 28 of Gap and 18 of Zara.

Can the recruitment and training of talents be able to keep pace with such a rapid pace of expansion? There are more than 100 thousand graduates applying for UNIQLO every year, but the actual vacancies in UNIQLO are only 500~600. The actual number of new employees in 2013 is 587, and the competition rate of 1/200 has become a symbolic figure of UNIQLO recruitment, which has also increased the difficulty of recruitment.

Back to 10 years ago, Pan Ning was faced with the difficulty of recruiting talents. UNIQLO entered China in 2001. It was not very successful. When Pan Ning was successful in Hongkong market, he began to take over the Chinese market at the end of 2005. At that time, there were 9 stores on the mainland, two in Beijing, 6 in Shanghai and 1 in Hangzhou. Ryui Masa, the chairman and CEO of fast selling, gave him the first task to turn off two stores in Beijing and concentrate on the Shanghai store. At that time, Pan Ning had only about 30 employees.

Liu Jing is expecting high hopes for Pan Ning. He has repeatedly urged penning "to succeed in China, first of all, to cultivate Chinese talents, and second, to win the trust of consumers." Before 2005, UNIQLO did not make any profit in China, but after Pan Ning took office, he made a series of strategic adjustments and finally positioned himself in the middle class. UNIQLO brand has been recognized by consumers and has been developing steadily since then.

The bottleneck of talent has become the biggest problem in expansion. By 2008, UNIQLO grew to more than a dozen stores in China. However, the domestic sports retail brand with vigorous popularity has developed to the scale of hundreds of shops. At that time, when conducting business propaganda in universities, Pan Ning often faced the embarrassing situation of only tens of students in such a large conference room. When he told the idea of UNIQLO's "China first and world first" in the future, he had encountered students' skeptical vision. "We have all persevered in such a depressing scene. Finally, we have proved that the road we have taken is correct and the dream can be realized." He recalls.

Pan Ning asked the Chinese team of UNIQLO to start with the recruitment process and attach importance to communication with talents. Starting from the top executives of UNIQLO, it is necessary for the management to act as a parent. Half of his working hours each year are related to recruitment.

In the recruitment mechanism of UNIQLO, candidates will be interviewed by the manager after the online application and examination. After that, they need to go through the links of district manager, personnel director and deputy general manager. "Part of the more than 500 people was passing the interview by clapper." He said.

But how to make a year Turnover More than tens of millions of shops are handed over to a more than 20 year old young manager to manage. The recruitment and training mechanism in this area determines the key to success. In Pan Ning's view, we should encourage young people to become future operators, we should have expectations for young people, train them in the process of actual combat, and finally accomplish their business results together. Every month, he and vice president must go to all parts of the country to communicate directly with front-line staff.

The efficient and professional recruitment and training mechanism is perfectly linked to more than 80 stores a year. "External evaluation of UNIQLO is the" Whampoa military academy "in the retail industry. The speed and quality of our talents are widely recognized by the industry. Pan Ning said.

The net increase in the number of 80 stores each year depends on the economic data survey system built by UNIQLO five years ago. Pan Ning said that from the provincial capital city of China to the two or three line city's comprehensive investigation, the data involved GDP, disposable income, urban future development plan and main business circle, all accumulated in five years.

"These data will blossom in the past one or two years." Pan Ning disclosed that UNIQLO had more than 100 stores in the northern Guangzhou and Shenzhen cities, and now continues to extend to the three or four tier cities.

In 2013, UNIQLO placed the world's largest flagship store in Shanghai, which was dubbed "the flagship store of UNIQLO", which is the symbol of UNIQLO's bet on the Chinese market. In Pan Ning's view, the city gives the UNIQLO brand more brand presence. "Shanghai used to be a symbol of China's brand, and it will become a window for the world to understand China in the future, just like Hongkong." He said.

In the process of expanding to the three or four tier cities, UNIQLO is also constantly mining "regional gold mines". In the broad sense, coastal areas are considered to have developed earlier. For example, the four super cities in North China and Guangzhou are concentrated in the eastern coastal areas and have a strong consumption capacity. But Pan Ning said that the consumption potential of the northwest, southwest and other areas is being constantly excavated.

Take Kunming as an example, the sales volume of UNIQLO's large storefront is equal to that of Shanghai, but the total population of Kunming is far less than that of Shanghai, and its per capita income is also lower than that of Shanghai. "Why sales performance is good? Because inland cities have consumer demand, they need to find the mouth of consumption, and become a brand that customers trust, and they can continue to increase consumption." Pan Ning said.

Recently, UNIQLO has gradually entered the Northwest market such as Lanzhou, Yinchuan and Hohhot, as well as Xi'an, Zhengzhou and other central cities, and the market development data are surprisingly good. Pan Ning attributed the reason to the development of the Internet and the mobile Internet. Users can get more consumer intelligence from all over the world and gradually develop their own unique consumption habits.

"With the development of the Internet and mobile Internet, we must speed up our pace, which is also to catch up with the growth rate of consumers, which represents our future growth space." He said, "double 11" sales is a strong evidence, the Chinese market has created a sales performance of 57 billion 100 million yuan a day, so that the developed countries attach importance to how to keep up with the changing trend of the Chinese era.

UNIQLO has responded quickly to the fast fashion brands that follow the trend of mobile terminals, and has achieved results in the 260 million yuan "double 11" sales data. About half of the orders come from the smart phone mobile terminals. In the recently launched UNIQLO code, the user can scan the products of the UNIQLO shop or outdoor advertisements to see the products in detail, including the material, price, style and so on. If customers do not have the appropriate number and color in the store, the nearest stores and inventory can be identified by sweeping code.

In Pan Ning's view, this is a fast way for new users to understand the characteristics of UNIQLO products, and it is also a higher challenge to enterprises. In the future, users may even be able to get the order online by scanning code, sending goods directly to the home, and truly connecting O2O linkage. At present, in the overall sales of UNIQLO, the online part accounts for only 6% of the total sales, but Pan Ning has confidence in the huge growth space of the online platform. After breaking through barriers such as electricity technology, logistics and O2O, it is also possible to achieve higher sales in the future.

The functional characteristics of UNIQLO products have been relished, and behind them are support from Dongli R & D team. As early as 1998, Ryui Masa visited the former president of the Dongli company Maeda Katsunosuke. In 2006, the two sides formally formed the "next generation raw material development team". Take the lightweight underwear Heattech for example, and sold one hundred million pieces in autumn and winter in 2011. Penning said: "this has changed the Chinese people's inherent concept that only thickness can keep warm. We have launched an upgraded version this year, and sales are still good.

After the product development, the main production base of UNIQLO is still in China. At present, more than 75% of the products are working with dozens of large Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Nearly 600 million products are produced in China every year. Due to the large production volume, strict quality control is needed in the process of R & D to production. "We have professionals who will send them to Chinese factories and work together with manufacturers to develop and implement them, including products that can be converted into standard quality in actual production projects." Pan Ning said.

In this part, Shanghai's R & D technicians will participate in the process, directly communicate with Tokyo, New York and Paris, collect fashion and functional information, and cooperate with local Chinese business partners to transform R & D into real products.

Beyond products, UNIQLO strives to maximize service, which can be traced to the gene from UNIQLO from Japan. Japan's service consciousness has made UNIQLO's advantage in China stand out. "More and more Chinese choose to go to Japan to consume," said penning. One Chinese went to Japan for an average consumption of more than 50 thousand yen, while the average consumption per capita in Korea and Asia was more than 10 thousand yen. Chinese people's consumption concept is very smart, they spend money to buy more value goods. Japanese consumers are the most demanding and choosy, and enterprises are more likely to go to the world after the baptism of Japanese consumers.

"Service equal to UNIQLO" has become the internal development criterion of UNIQLO. In daily life, employees will carry out "smile on the chopsticks" training, add a piece of clothing in 7 seconds, pinch stopwatch to calculate the speed of cash register; the store keeper will mobilize a working place every half a year, so that every store manager can understand the concept of "manager is the operator". Until now, Pan Ning has always encouraged the staff: "now I must step on the sewing machine faster than you, and the clothes must be folded better than yours."

At present, UNIQLO stores in China are all direct outlets, reducing agents, distributors and other intermediate links.