Lining Entered The Bidding Business To Pursue Young People'S Footsteps.

New crowd, new sports and new Lining.

"What we fear most is brand aging."

Lining group executive director, extraordinary China sports CEO Li Qilin to "three voices" (WeChat public ID:tosansheng) said.

As the main leader of Lining group's innovation strategy development and resource integration, since 2015, including the national tide and the new retail pformation, Li Qilin has participated in and led a series of younger pformation of Lining brand.

His new record is led to complete the acquisition of Snake by Lining group.

According to the three tone, Lining group has completed the acquisition of Snake electric club at the beginning of this year. The acquisition only involves hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.

Snake is an old LPL club and has a permanent alliance seat.

In the field of sports, Li Qilin has been trying to find new opportunities, a chance for Lining to get the first place in the future. It needs to form enough extensive links with enough young people, and also has sufficient sense of experience and magnifying potential of industrialization.

What does a younger Lining and a more experienced Lining look like? Li Qilin hopes to find more answers in the competition.

Lining of young people

In 2015, Li Qilin returned to management with uncle Lining, and seized young people as one of their most important work goals.

As one of the earliest original sports brands in China, Lining, who is 30 years old, was once a common memory of a generation of Chinese people. But it was also faced with a serious problem of aging.

A consumer survey showed that between 2006 and 2007, more than 50% of Lining's brand consumer groups aged 35 to 40 years old.

"Lining's brand should not be remembered after 50 and 60, but to be accepted by young people."

Li Qilin said.

Within the Lining group, research on young people and young culture continues in every department.

"We have been thinking and researching all the time, even a sentence of a person, a barrage, every action has its own meaning behind it."

Li Qilin said.

In 2018, with the appearance of the fashion week in New York and the fashion week in Paris, the opening of Sanlitun flash shop, with the word "chao chao" as the key word, Lining quickly began to make a sound in the new generation of Chinese young people.

However, in Li Qilin's view, this is still a way of embodiment and communication, and does not involve Lining's core. "The threshold of a fashion company and a trend company is too low."

Recently, Lining re enacted the first product 001 after the brand was founded.

In those days, the error of shoemaking technology caused the quality problem of this sneaker. For the sake of the company's reputation and brand image, Lining did not choose to sell at a low price, but destroyed all the products.

"Why do we need to re engrad this product, including the promotion within the group?

We hope that every employee will remember Lining's idea. Lining is not a factory maker. What we started from the beginning was the sports brand.

In a sense, the difficulty of a brand being younger is far greater than that of a product or even a series of products. It not only changes the design style, but also includes the pformation of the supply chain, the upgrading of the consumer experience, and the continuous emotional link between more time, more places and young people.

Lining made a more flexible and efficient integration of the supply chain.

Among them, we should adopt differentiated strategy in single store management, strengthen the support and control of distributors, optimize the channel structure, expand the integration of online channels and online offline, strengthen the use and data management of new technologies, and further build a closed loop of retail operations.

"Whether online or offline, it is neither new nor old. I want to embrace the future retail mode, especially the emergence of new technology, and the ultimate goal is to improve the consumer experience."

Li Qilin told the three voice.

For example, after the small program function was launched, Lining immediately developed his own small program system.

Compared with the former two, the emergence of consumers' emotional identity is even more elusive and the process is longer. In addition to the continuous introduction of new products, Li Qilin hopes to find new potential entry points.

This made him pay attention to the competition industry two years ago.

In the Chinese market, there are hundreds of millions of fans in the Chinese market, and the cumulative number of LPL watches in China has exceeded NBA. This means that competition has become one of the most important cultural and entertainment projects for young people in China.

Lining can not miss such a "future", which also made him a big group after entering ASUS, Suning, Jingdong and other companies, and is a traditional industry group.

"The opportunity to shine."

In fact, Lining has caused some controversy over the entry of the electronic competition industry, which may be different from the Internet and hardware background of most companies. Lining used to know more about sports brands.

But in Li Qilin's view, it may not seem necessary for us to debate whether electric sports are sports at this stage.

"The spirit of competition in 90% is overlapped with sports spirit. Why do I spend time arguing about the remaining 10% or even 5%?"

Li Qilin said.

Li Qilin believes that electric competition is more like natural products under the upgrading of science and technology, just like the emergence of F1 events after the advent of industrial era.

"Developing new competitions on new technology platforms is what we value."

Li Qilin said to the three voice.

But in the past two years, despite the excellent opportunity of many entries, Li Qilin remained relatively cautious.

He is constantly assessing whether competition has really had a wide impact on most young people, and whether it has really become an independent industry with real value, rather than just an accessory to marketing.

"In the past one to two years, I have contacted many people in the industry, from the top players of the major game manufacturers to the practitioners of the electricity industry, and then to the players, to feel the future direction of the competition and the position they are in now."

Li Qilin recalls.

Another consideration is how Lining should cut in and what input and output ratio is more reasonable.

At the end of 2017, when LPL opened its first bid for the competition, Li Guilin offered to give up the opportunity despite speculation that Lining would take part in the competition.

"We learned the news of the bid, but after weighing it, we decided not to take part."

Li Qilin told the three voice, "we analyzed the situation at that time.

We still have a lot of work to do after we get a permanent seat. We will spend a lot of energy and take a huge risk of trial and error. This is not a reasonable business model for me, so we did not participate in the 2018 competition.

In this process, Lining further tested the market through business cooperation and so on. He signed a contract with EDG, RNG and Hero for a long time and launched a joint name.

Among them, the joint venture launched with EDG was sold out 7 minutes later, and the sales of offline stores increased by 6 times.

The establishment of tengjing sports is another signal that makes Li Qilin feel more confident.

The company, established jointly by Tencent interactive entertainment and fist games, has a registered capital of 540 million yuan and will fully operate LPL related business in the future.

"This makes me feel very relieved. This shows that Tencent is developing alliances in the long run. What I fear most is that it becomes a simple marketing behavior."

But Li Qilin is still waiting for a suitable moment, which he called "a moment of glory".

At the moment when I met Snake club, the moment finally came.

1+1>2

As one of the old game clubs, the Snake E-sports club, founded in 2013, is one of the clubs that have been accreditation by the LPL alliance and have LPL permanent seats.

A more stable team and healthy financial situation are important reasons for Li Qilin's choice of Snake.

It is worth noting that after the acquisition, Lining did not interfere too much with Snake's original management team. Even after substantially reducing the shareholding ratio, Snake founder, Shuang Quan, was still responsible for the daily management of the club as a shareholder.

In this way of cooperation, Li Qilin has paid special attention to the self driving nature of the founding team in the early contact with the clubs.

"What I want is a pure team, dedicated to the game, focusing on the improvement of the performance and the operation of the club, rather than thinking about doing something else."

Li Qilin said.

He saw this feeling on the Snake team. The paction was advancing at a very fast speed, including hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and part of the equity replacement. In less than three weeks, Lining completed the acquisition of Snake.

But for Lining and Snake, the challenge has just begun. One view is that Lining, who has been working in the traditional sports industry for many years, may not be able to adapt to the operation mode of the electric industry.

Li Qilin believes that Lining's sports genes will not become a barrier to communication and cooperation. Instead, what Lining should do is to bring the perception and understanding of sports into the new field of electric competition for many years.

For a competitive club, its core strengths may be varied. Besides the achievements, management concepts and management systems, youth training system, value creation and cultural concepts are the key to the club building.

But in Li Qilin's view, the club in the industry has not yet found the most suitable solution.

"Everyone is groping, but as a professional sports operator, Lining's entry point is our sports attribute, using sports and sports genes and resources to pform."

Li Qilin said.

On the day of the interview, Li Qilin invited the Snake team in Chongqing and Shanghai to visit the Lining Park in Tongzhou, Beijing.

"Let them feel the real concept of sports. After that, we will arrange management and players to visit professional sports teams and national teams, so that they can feel the status and standards of professional athletes."

Li Qilin hoped that the traditional sports concept could be conveyed to the team through this way, and the spirit of sportsmanship could be derived from it.

"I believe these are very positive and are not available to other clubs."

In a more specific way, Lining will work out with the original management team to set the direction for the future development of the club and jointly set up a more capable management team. Lining will provide professional help to Snake in many fields such as youth system construction, venue operation and medical rehabilitation.

On the other hand, for Lining, who plans to build an integrated sports experience brand, the online competition with dual attributes of online and offline and continuous content accompanying is given important series value.

In 2015, after reestablishing the goal of "providing Lining brand experience value", Lining group proposed the pformation of "Internet + sports life experience provider".

"The core is the concept of consumption sports and sports culture.

Not only sports products, but also sports events, sports crowd experience and so on.

At present, Lining has invested many sports parks in Yangzhou, Hangzhou and Ningbo.

"We have always wanted to create a brand of experience online and offline integration in the field of sports, which is what we most want to do.

For example, in sports venues, there are continuous small scale competitions for local communities. We have experience of rehabilitation and fitness for our investment, sports education projects and sales of derivative products, and electric competition will be an important part of it.

"It must be 1+1>2."

Li Qilin said.