Recently, there are many bright spots in the business progress of Weimeng Group. On January 21, a public announcement released by Weimeng shows that the overall business operation of Weimeng Group has maintained steady growth, operating losses have been significantly reduced compared with the same period last year, cash flow has continued to improve, and operating cash flow has been positive in the second half of 2023. It is worth noting that Gongyi also mentioned that the international business of Weimeng is progressing smoothly, and there are a number of projects waiting to be signed in the Middle East, which are expected to become a new business growth point of Weimeng.

In fact, since October 2023, Weimu announced the transformation from group business group system to business sub-group system, and formally established three major sub-groups, including Weimeng International, the industry and market have paid more attention to the international business of Weimeng. According to reports, at present, the international business of Weimeng has made remarkable progress, especially the international business of subsidiary Haiding.

01 the internationalization of subsidiaries has made remarkable progress, covering more than 80 countries

Haiding was founded in 1997, and its core business is to provide information solutions for chain retail, commercial real estate and warehousing logistics, as well as innovative businesses related to payment and smart hardware, for convenience, merchant freshness, monopoly and shopping malls. In early November 2020, Weimeng announced that it would acquire 51% of the shares of Shanghai Haiding Information Engineering Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Haiding") through the development of its wholly-owned subsidiary, Weimeng, in the form of capital increase and share transfer, and bring it into the listed company system.

In terms of international business deployment, Haiding has its lead. According to reports, Haiding has been carrying out international transformation of its products since 2015.

"initially, Haiding's international business originated from the overseas needs of Chinese customers' digital business. Based on the overseas needs of customers' business, Haiding gradually completed the adaptation of product internationalization, and then gradually began to serve overseas and local customers' information and digital layout. Up to now, Haiding has served many large enterprises or international super groups, such as famous quality products, Popomat, early Yuan Food, Dubai Wenchao Group, Philippine DIVIMART, Philippine ATTAW, Thailand Dahua supermarket and so on. Overseas customers from more than 80 countries or regions have used the Haiding system. " Haiding CEO Jiang Zuoliang said.

Take Mingchuang as an example, Mingchuang Premium was established in 2013, its business covers more than 100 countries and has more than 6000 stores around the world.

On March 28, 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce jointly issued the Vision and Action for promoting the Joint Construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which opened the prelude to the new "Great Navigation era". Famous and innovative products with great foresight also chose to go out to sea this year. In order to adapt to the globalization strategy of famous and high-quality products, Haiding began to carry out international transformation of its products, accompanying the development of famous high-quality products from the first to 6000 + at home and abroad.

Based on the information support of Haiding, Mingchuang quality products have realized supply chain innovation, supported upstream manufacturer production and quality inspection business follow-up, promoted the fine operation of downstream stores, and further implemented the "investment-oriented joining model". And realized the global development. It can be said that the information planning delivered by Haiding has laid a foundation for the rapid and steady development of the overseas business development of famous quality products.

Today, Haiding international business solution has been able to support multi-currency business, Chinese and English and other multi-language switching, support international commonly used payment methods, and achieve flexible and complete tax system management and control. and can support cross-regional multi-organization management coordination and application deployment.

It is worth mentioning that, as a "veteran of the retail industry", Haiding has more outstanding advantages in serving the international business of multi-format and multi-organizational enterprises.

Yuanchu Food is a food chain enterprise mainly promoting its own brand commodities, self-built retail channels and self-controlled supply chain, involving food retail wholesale industry, food import and export, e-commerce business and other business fields. Its core business is food store retail business with chain supermarket as channel. Covering the full link business of front, middle and back end of retail, Yuanchu Food can be regarded as one of the typical enterprises under chain retail mode.

The cooperation between Haiding and early Yuan Food began many years ago. with the layout of multi-format, multi-region and full-chain in the early Yuan Dynasty, the needs of enterprise management became more and more complex. In 2021, Haiding upgraded the system pertinently for the early Yuan Dynasty. Canadian subsidiaries, self-owned supplier subsidiaries and cross-industry subsidiaries are all integrated into the unified management of the early Yuan system. By July 2023, early Yuan Food had opened 179 community fresh supermarkets (including 5 food and beverage integration areas and multiple food and beverage stalls), 13 convenience stores and 6 e-commerce stores in Xiamen, Shenzhen, Dalian, Quanzhou and Vancouver, Canada. the cumulative number of stores in various formats has reached 204. "through the opening of multi-system links, Haiding helped food in the early Yuan Dynasty to achieve a full range of business management and control." Jiang Zuoliang said.

As a subsidiary of Weimeng listed company system, in response to the group's core "internationalization" strategy, Haiding has positioned its international business as the company's strategic business and will focus on promoting it in 2024. Jiang Zuoliang also said: "at present, going out to sea is becoming one of the biggest development dividends for Chinese retail enterprises. Haiding hopes to gather Chinese retail leaders to go to the new wave of going out to sea."

02 build a strong overseas moat, Weimeng opens a new increment of internationalization

Since 2020, when it proposed three major strategies, including "internationalization", Weimeng has regarded going out to sea as the third growth curve. Therefore, in addition to making use of the leading overseas layout of the subsidiaries to expand the depth of the group's internationalization strategy and speed up the layout of overseas business, Weimeng also actively promotes the internationalization strategy and continues to expand the applicable scenarios of overseas products and services in various business sectors of the group headquarters.

In recent years, with a new wave of going out to sea in China, technology going to sea has gradually become the mainstream. There are two main ways to do this-one is to follow the overseas layout of domestic customers, and the other is to directly target overseas markets and serve global enterprises and local enterprises in target markets. With the trend of domestic enterprises going out to sea to dig gold, it has become an inevitable choice for Weimeng to accompany customers to go to sea.

At the same time, the vast overseas market opportunities and the global online shopping trend have made cross-border e-commerce a highlight track in recent years. Traditional e-commerce giants have set up cross-border e-commerce platforms, while brand merchants have also expanded their business out to sea. With the dividend of public domain traffic peaking, merchants are no longer limited to a single cross-border e-commerce platform. However, when expanding in unfamiliar overseas markets, businesses first face the problem of "high cost of obtaining overseas customers and being unable to reach the target users".

To this end, Weimeng will replicate the smart marketing service capabilities that have been cultivated in China for many years to overseas markets, directly hitting many pain points in cross-border marketing links. At present, Weimeng has cooperated with foreign mainstream media such as Google, Facebook, Tik Tok, Apple Ads and so on. The expansion of brand exposure through multi-channel promotion has also greatly accelerated the process of Chinese brands going to sea digitally.

In 2023, Weimeng Marketing has realized the deep value mining of overseas marketing in finance, online service, fitness, home decoration, auto parts and other industries. In December of the same year, Weimeng Marketing also officially signed a contract with Google CPP to obtain a first-class agency license in China. Combined with Google's global traffic advantage and Weimeng's digital marketing service ability, the two sides work together to serve Chinese enterprises to go out to sea. This means that Weimeng Marketing's overseas service capacity is further strengthened.

In addition, Weimeng is constantly iterating its technical capabilities to improve the efficiency of overseas marketing driven by technology.

Take Weimeng and Google's wide-ranging marketing business collaboration as an example, the two sides are constantly exploring new increments in the global marketing market based on new content forms and technology trends. With the cooperation of Google AI products, Weimeng marketing can help merchants operate efficiently by optimizing the wide launch strategy. The intelligent model driven by AI can also maximize the needs of overseas users and improve user participation and conversion rate.

In addition to working with Google and other giants, Weimeng also insists on honing its own technical strength and using technology to drive marketing upgrades at home and abroad. In May 2023, Weimeng released the AI application product Weimeng WAI, which can intelligently produce widely creative materials such as copywriting, pictures and short videos, and support the generation of diversified materials for marketing at home and abroad. Under the WAI-enhanced marketing business, the efficiency of wide-ranging content generation, including creative images, has increased by more than 50%, and the availability rate of AI-generated content in the wide-ranging business has reached 70%.

According to reports, Weimeng WAI's intelligent creative ability has covered the global marketing scene. In addition to the mature Wen Sheng Wen, Wen Sheng Graph functions, the future will also test and open the ability of AI to produce video, which is expected to bring a bonus effect for overseas marketing.

By continuously deepening marketing service capabilities and improving marketing efficiency driven by technology, Weimeng is helping Chinese brands to reach out to the world and helping customers succeed in all aspects.

Driven by the "internationalization" strategy, the overseas business has become a new driving force for Weimeng's performance growth in just two years. According to the financial report, in 2022, the performance of Weimeng overseas broadcasters increased 10 times compared with the same period last year, and the monthly performance of overseas broadcasters exceeded 10 million.

However, the micro-alliance has not stopped and is still actively exploring overseas growth space. In a recent announcement, Weimeng pointed out that the international business is progressing smoothly and there are many projects to be signed in the Middle East. The Middle East is now a hot spot for Chinese companies to go to sea and invest, and this emerging market is expected to become a new business growth point for Weimeng.

03 conclusion

On October 24, 2023, Sun Taoyong said in the full letter "rekindle entrepreneurial passion and go to a bigger dream" that he will explore the development of overseas markets in a product-driven growth way with the help of Weimeng's product accumulation and precipitation over the past decade. According to the specific situation of different countries and regions, to expand the corresponding products and services, and finally help Weimeng to achieve the third growth curve.

According to the view of the industry, in the new wave of going out to sea, Weimeng has stepped out of the path of industry reference. Whether it is the strategic layout and business planning at the group level, or the combination of strong and strong forces under the measures of M & A, investment and financing, there is a lot of room for imagination in the international business development of Weimeng.

Still take Haiding as an example, from the perspective of business coordination, Haiding's core business is in the middle and backstage, providing enterprises with information solutions and innovative business services, while Weimeng is better at front-end management, which can provide a path from customer acquisition to transaction. The cooperation of the two sides has opened up the front, middle and background of the enterprise digital upgrade, combined with the strong marketing ability of Weimeng, it can provide the enterprise with full-link digital upgrade path. And this has also brought considerable achievements, such as the two sides jointly polished the wisdom of fresh, wisdom business super and other solutions.

As Weimeng and Haiding continue their long march on the sea track, the two sides are also expected to "replicate" their mature business collaboration experience at home to overseas markets, providing greater potential energy for Chinese enterprises to go abroad and overseas enterprises to digitally upgrade. While continuously improving the service capacity of Weimeng merchants, it will also provide more room for revenue growth, which is expected to enhance the long-term profitability of Weimeng.