You put the spicy strips in the market.

Here comes the first batch of spicy strips.

According to IFR, a subsidiary of Reuters, Wei Long Food Company, which is famous for producing spicy strips in China, plans to raise $6,543.80 billion in Hong Kong IPO next year. At present, the company is cooperating with CICC, Morgan Stanley and UBS to discuss the listing in the second half of next year.

Previously, Weilong had made frequent equity changes, which was considered by the industry to pave the way for listing. There were rumors of listing a few years ago.

It can be seen that Wei Long's ambition is getting bigger and bigger. Liu Weiping, the founder, once suggested that a larger production base and R&D cost are needed, which may also be part of Wei Long's financing plan of $654.38 billion.

Speaking of Wei Long, it can be said that everyone knows it, but Wei Long has developed rapidly in recent years, and it is no longer the spicy brand in your memory.

The birth of Wei Long began with a flood.

During the period of 1998, Hunan suffered a serious flood disaster and the crops were seriously damaged. The production capacity of soybean, the main raw material of dry soy sauce, decreased and the price rose sharply, which had a great impact on the original industry.

In order to reduce the cost, the three masters of the dry sauce workshop used gluten instead of dried beans, but they made a substitute with similar taste and much cheaper price, which is the prototype of today's spicy strips.

Because of the simple production, the early production threshold of spicy strips is extremely low, and a large number of small workshop manufacturers have emerged in the market. Pingjiang is a mountainous area and does not produce flour. Local enterprises have neither raw material advantages nor sales advantages. If they want to sell their products, they still need the right area.

1997 to 1998, Liu Weiping, who graduated from high school, works in a Taiwan-funded enterprise in Guangdong. Seeing that he followed the advice of his fellow villagers, Liu Weiping decided to try his luck in Luohe.

Luohe is an important town of Henan food industry, with not only Shuanghui, but also local leading food enterprises such as Nanjie Village, Australian Deli Shop and Beixu. It also attracts domestic and foreign heavyweight food enterprises such as Goldman Sachs, DuPont, Japanese Ham Co., Ltd., Lotte Korea, COFCO, Want Want Group and Zheng Da Group to invest and build factories in the local area.

So1August, 1999, Liu Weiping boarded the No.2153 train and arrived at Luohe at 3 am.

Facts have proved that his final position is correct.

In 2000, Liu Weiping had dinner with his fellow villagers and found a kind of food called beef tendon noodles. Later, Liu Weiping found the production place of beef tendon noodles, which is also a small workshop with only a simple bulking machine.

Liu Weiping paid a deposit and asked the shopkeeper to improve the mold. A week later, the product came out. He added some caramel and Chili noodles to make a brown product, which is a bit like eel, so he named it "eel belt".

Later, more and more people called it "spicy strip" and "spicy silk". Liu Weiping's spicy strips were made several times with the spirit of death eaters, and finally the products were satisfactory.

Similar to the spirit of rote memorization, Zhang Hongchao of Mi Xue Ice City initially came up with several recipes based on his own understanding of cold drinks. However, the taste of the first few trial-produced ice creams was not satisfactory, and Zhang Hongchao did not give up. One pot didn't work, so he adjusted the recipe and cooked it for several days. He kept trying, and the guy who tried it almost threw up.

Back in Wei Long, at first, in order to promote spicy silk, Liu Weiping began to stay in a school near the factory. Whenever school is over, he stands at the school gate and even invites students to try it for free.

A small detail is that in order to facilitate students to put spicy strips directly into their clothes pockets, Liu Weiping also changed the original large package of 12cm to a smaller size, which also showed Liu Weiping's extraordinary business acumen.

The school's initial water test was very successful, which made Liu Weiping's spicy shredded pork noodles get overwhelming praise. Thus, since 2002, the output of beef tendon noodles in Liu Weiping has soared, from one machine to dozens. By 2003, Liu Weiping registered the "Wei Long" trademark for his spicy strips. It is said that Wei Long's invention still borrowed a sentence from Liu Weiping and Jackie Chan.

The following year, the company registered and put into production production bases in Luohe, Zhumadian and Fugou, Henan.

In order to promote spicy strips, it is said that Wei Long adheres to the "mass line". Promote your own spicy strips through small advertisements on the street, writing soft reports and giving health knowledge lectures.

It is said that in the early days, Liu Weiping hired a large number of farmers to push the land around the Luohe River 100km, 200 km, and from Carrefour and Wal-Mart to small shops in schools and communities, posters and flags were posted everywhere.

According to Liu Weiping, the "Wei Long" spicy strips were originally rooted in Luohe, so we should open the Luohe market first, then expand to Zhengzhou, then to Henan Province and the whole country.

At the beginning of opening the market, Wei Long Spicy Bar set an order quantity standard of "600 pieces per day" for dealers. If you don't reach the order quantity of 600 pieces a day, you won't open up the next customer. For Wei Long, this can not only ensure that the product sales can keep up, but also provide a basis for customers to pay more and more attention.

Many things happen, and small spicy strips capture people's hearts. Wei Long's business is booming.

Wei Long's ambition goes far beyond Luohe.

With its increasing popularity in many places, Wei Long is also facing a long-standing problem: the brand image is too sinking.

Just as many people subconsciously think that spicy strips are junk products when they mention them, they also think that Wei Long is a low-end product tacitly.

How to solve this long-standing pain point? Wei Long thought of a way, Apple Marketing.

"250g super capacity, strong chewing kiss. It will be released on September 13, with a limited edition of 500 copies. "

"Weilong R&D room has developed a new spicy taste, and the spicy taste of 2 100 is closer to the national tongue tip preference, making the spicy taste more temperature."

This is a copy with goods close to Apple, with simple product design and black, white and gray tones. It was very novel at that time, which made consumers shine at the moment, thinking of advertisements and Wei Long.

Wei Long fought a beautiful battle to win the minds of consumers.

At the same time, Wei Long also paid more attention to offline.

One month after the release of Hotstrip 7.0, Wei Long Guan Wei released a set of pictures, and spicy strips with different tastes were displayed as exhibits in glass display cabinets. Whether it is the decoration style or product display, it is exactly the same as the offline store of iPhone.

Statistics show that in two days, the forwarding volume of this Weibo exceeded 35,000, and the number of comments exceeded 1.4 million.

In the process of marketing touching the net, in 20 15 years, Wei Long's sales also began to March online. In a short period of time, Wei Long quickly settled in Tmall, JD.COM, Store 1, Taobao Mall and other major e-commerce platforms, and quickly accumulated a large number of fans, with millions of fans.

In addition to marketing, Wei Long has been exploring category diversification in recent years.

According to beijing business today Today's 20 19 report, Wei Long Food has established several production bases, such as Luohe Pingping, Zhumadian Pingping, Qinqin Dried Bean, Future Food, etc., which mainly produce seasoned flour products.

At present, in addition to spicy strips, Wei Long food also includes konjac flour, potato chips, crispy rice, beef, chicken feet, braised eggs, spicy hot pot and so on.

Wei Long's products are not only spicy strips, but also its product lines are constantly enriched and expanded. For example, in 20 14, Wei Long invested a lot of money to establish the third food production base, and the crispy noodles and konjac production lines were also built.

The upsurge of self-heating food broke out around 20 17, and Wei Long actively followed up and launched the self-heating hot pot brand "Back Pot Man" for people with heavy tastes in Sichuan, Hunan and Chongqing; 20 18, Wei Long launched "self-cooked" spicy hot pot products to facilitate the food market; In 20 19, Wei Long sold hot and sour powder and charcoal sausage on Tmall. In 2020, Wei Long launched a new series of stewed eggs.

According to official website, at present, Wei Long has built dozens of products in four categories: flour products, bean products, konjac products and vegetable products. According to Liu Weiping, in just 20 19, Wei Long used nearly 200,000 tons of agricultural and sideline products such as flour, kelp, soybeans, peppers and konjac.

In order to cope with the new changes, Wei Long has also begun to exert its efforts in research and development, and set up the Central Spicy Leisure Food Research Institute. After professional R&D personnel showed the taste, ingredients and packaging of the products, they developed new spicy strips.

Earlier this year, Liu Weiping also revealed to the media that he would build brand-new factories and workshops to build a smarter Wei Long.

From marketing to products, Wei Long has developed rapidly in recent years.

At the partner conference in 2020, Liu Weiping, chairman of Wei Long, revealed that the overall revenue of Wei Long in 20 19 was 4.909 billion yuan, including 2.55 billion yuan for terminal direct sales, 0.8 billion yuan for distribution channels and 559 million yuan for e-commerce channels. Compared with the income of 3.5 billion yuan in 20 18, the growth rate is nearly 43%. Meanwhile, Liu Weiping said that Weilong's revenue target in 2020 is 7.2 billion yuan, which is expected to increase by nearly 47% on the basis of 20 19.

Wei Long's listing has something to do with the growth potential of the company. How big is the whole market?

At present, according to the Development Report of Snack Industry under the Background of Consumption Upgrading issued by the Circulation Industry Promotion Center of the Ministry of Commerce, the total output value of snack industry will be close to 3 trillion yuan in 2020, of which the annual output value of spicy strips is nearly 60 billion yuan.

Spicy strips are a product with high profit margin. China food industry analyst Zhu said that the average gross profit margin of spicy strips is close to 50%. However, there is no national leader in this industry. Even in Wei Long, the market share is less than 65,438+00% of the whole industry.

Wei Long has set a sales target of 654.38+00 billion.

But behind the seemingly rapid growth, Wei Long is not without hidden worries.

In fact, food safety has always been an unavoidable heart disease when hot strip enterprises seek listing. Even though Wei Long tried to prove that he was "clean and hygienic" by actions, he was repeatedly included in the black list of food safety sampling.

According to public information, Pingping Food, which is controlled by Luohe Wei Long Trading Co., Ltd., ranks first in judicial cases, namely product liability disputes, with 39 cases.

20 15 Luohe quality inspection bureau issued a penalty notice, claiming that the mouth-baked and gluten produced by Pingping food passed off as unqualified products. It was ordered to stop producing and selling unqualified products, with a total fine of 85,700 yuan.

After the exposure of Spicy Bar 3 15, in 20 19, Wei Long highlighted three key points: deepening the terminal, focusing on the market, focusing on the display, and issued the notice "Wei Long Leisure Guests are forbidden to compete for products", stipulating that dealers are not allowed to compete for products.

Second, there are more and more competitors.

The high gross profit characteristics of spicy strips naturally attract capital to join. Internet celebrity snack brands such as three squirrels, good shops, herbs and gold shops have also entered the spicy strip industry. After all, there is no conflict between people who like nuts and those who like spicy strips.

In fact, three squirrels and good shops that have gained a foothold in the high-end have already tried to sink the route, hoping to launch an impact on Weilong with the brand awareness, consumer acceptance and customer base superimposed by diehard powder.

Some of these brands are rising at an obvious speed. For example, according to the statistics of FMCG.com, in 20 17, Wei Long ranked fifth, and Yanjin store ranked 10. A year later, in 20 18, Wei Long maintained its ranking, while Yanjin Puzi was promoted to 7th place.

It can be seen that Wei Long, which is about to be listed, also has many embarrassments. Whether it can withstand the attack of many competing products for a long time still needs the test of the market.