Daphne Store Thousands Of Shops, Loss 800 Million, Once The Shoe Giant What?

The performance of the shoe brand Daphne, which once dominated the domestic market, continued to deteriorate.

Now, it has handed out the worst annual financial statement in history.

In April 15th, the 2018 annual financial report of the company showed that the turnover of the company was HK $4 billion 127 million 100 thousand, down 20.8% compared with the same period last year, with a gross profit of HK $2 billion 61 million, a decrease of 25.1%, and a HK $786 million 600 thousand operating loss, which was larger than that of the previous year (the operating deficit was HK $688 million 800 thousand last year).

As for a significant decline in turnover, Daphne explained that this was mainly due to the decrease in the number of shops in its core brand business from 3589 at the end of 2017 to 2648 (26.2%) at the end of 2018, and the decline in same store sales, leading to a decline in its sales.

The decline in gross profit, Daphne said, is due to the increase in the proportion of over the past inventory in the sales mix.

"In 2018, the group continued its business pformation strategy aimed at restoring profitability.

However, the adverse economic environment to combat consumer sentiment makes the effect of the group's business pformation plan not fully reflected in its 2018 financial performance.

Daphne said in its 2018 annual report.

In the face of deteriorating business environment, the company has chosen to accelerate the closing of the loss shop to enhance overall business efficiency.

On the other hand, it tries to increase its market penetration through the sales channels of more fashionable shopping centers, so as to adapt to the fast changing consumption patterns and consumer preferences.

The annual report shows that in 2018, Daphne closed 1016 sales outlets.

By the end of 2018, however, the company still had 2820 sales outlets ("POS"), including 2648 sales outlets for core brand businesses and 172 sales outlets for other brand businesses.

Data show that Daphne has gone through a period of crazy expansion.

From 2003 to 2009, the total number of stores increased from 739 stores to 6702, and increased by more than 9 times in ten years.

In 2012, the number of Daphne stores reached its peak, and the number of stores reached 6881.

That is to say, from 2009 to 2012, Daphne grew at a rate of 1000 a year.

In its annual report of fiscal year 2018, Daphne acknowledges that the increasingly difficult business environment hinders the pformation of the company's business and is increasingly challenging to keep up with increasingly complex consumer demand and fierce competition.

In response to such challenges, in addition to taking measures to close shops, Daphne has also carried out strict inventory management to expedite the clearance of over season stocks with large discounts.

Daphne said in its annual report that the narrowing of the retail network and discounts would bring downward pressure on the group's turnover and gross margins.

In addition, Daphne said the company is trying to improve the speed of the supply chain.

Over the past year, the company has started looking for manufacturers that can shorten the delivery cycle so that they can maintain orders of different kinds of products in manageable levels in a relatively short period of time, thereby reducing the risk of backlog due to the forecast bias of demand.

To this end, in 2018, Daphne continued to integrate warehouses to enhance supply chain management.

These include closing several regional warehouses and integrating the remaining warehouses.

This can reduce the overall distance from warehouse to store product delivery and shorten the time to store.

The fall of the Volkswagen shoe giant is a sad story. Industry analysts believe that Daphne's fall is not related to its strategic planning mistakes in the era of e-commerce.

As early as 2010, Daphne had already entered Tmall, and then worked with dozens of online sales platforms such as Jingdong, Holle, vip.com and so on.

But since then, Daphne has smashed 30 million yuan to choose investment to set up in 2009, "Yao point 100". For this reason, Daphne has even closed Jingdong, Le Tao and Haoyue buy, and other advantages of e-commerce distribution channels, unfortunately, in May 2010 entered the trial operation "100 points", two years later, due to the chain breaking operation.

The failure of "Yao point 100" has brought a major blow to Daphne's e-commerce business.

It was not until 2013 that Daphne began to attach importance to the development of the electricity supplier in its annual report.

However, at this time, the competition of shoe brand e-commerce has entered a more intense period.

In addition, Daphne has been criticized by the market because it has not been able to catch the customers' psychology these years, and the ability of product development is insufficient.

However, Daphne has been hoping for something in this regard.

In this annual report, Daphne said that the company is committed to strengthening product research and development, focusing on fashionable and comfortable sports shoes, and will expand its product range to meet different needs of customers, adapting to the changing consumer preferences and consumption patterns.