Recently, Hi-Tec, a professional hiking brand in the outdoor field, announced that the flagship series with Michelin's top sole technology became a stepping stone to enter the Chinese market in July, and Michelin, which has always been known for its professional tire production technology, used its unique technology in tire to create the Michelin sole flat brand.

Since the industrialization of shoe soles, the sole industry has moved from OEM to independent research and development, new materials and new physical properties, lightness, waterproof and anti-slip, material environmental protection and other professional fields of new technologies have been progressing. However, under China's current economic normal, the problems encountered by the shoe sole industry as a traditional manufacturing category are far from being as simple as technological progress, and the biggest problem now is that the entire industrial chain concept is weak and the business model is not formed.

First, at this stage, China's shoe sole industry under the sluggish growth rate of the entire GDP, what obstacles have been encountered in the development of the industry?

1. Footwear production is still growing, but the growth rate of sales revenue continues to decline

According to statistics, there were 2015,1 shoe enterprises in January ~ December 12, with a cumulative sales revenue of 4505.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 437.75%, and the growth rate fell by 6.97 percentage points. It decreased by 1.92 percentage points compared with 2014.

2. Sales margin decreased slightly

In 2015, the total profit of the national footwear industry was 450 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.46%, and the growth rate fell by 3.8 percentage points. The sales margin was 6.05%, a slight decrease from last year.

3. Footwear exports showed negative growth

The annual footwear exports were 98.7 billion pairs, 511.8 billion US dollars, down 1.5% and 1.9% year-on-year, respectively, and the growth rate was 6.16 and 9.16 percentage points lower than the previous year. Different from the previous two export declines, in this decline cycle, major competitors such as Vietnam and Indonesia have risen rapidly, and instead of the phenomenon of synchronous export growth with China falling to negative values in the previous two decline cycles, they still maintained growth of 3.9% and <>% respectively during the same period.

4. Imports maintain rapid growth

In 2015, the import volume of footwear increased by 32.4%, the value increased by 20.1%, and the unit price of imports increased by -3.4%.

——Data source: "Operation of China's Footwear Industry in 2016" released by the 2015 Annual Meeting of the China Leather Association and the Footwear Materials Committee and the Global Footwear and Sports Industry Development Trend Forum

- Source: National Bureau of Statistics

According to the data, we can see that China's footwear industry, whether it is sales performance or profit, on the whole, the growth rate is declining, and some important economic indicators have shown negative growth. Large enterprises control the main profit margin (8.4%), and the profit of small and medium-sized enterprises decreases (5.0%), which shows from the table of the number of shoes and hats market that the upper scale market is decreasing year by year; The offline retail market underwent a downward adjustment, the decline slowed down, and the online retail dividend gradually disappeared in 2015, and the growth rate fell significantly (online men's and women's shoe sales in 2015 were 500 billion, corresponding to a growth rate of -6.4%); Leather shoes, rubber shoes, plastic shoes and cloth shoes are the four major categories of China's exports, and the growth rate of orders outflow and imports has led to the impact on the shoe sole market, which is dominated by plastic soles.

Second, how does the "Internet + sole" platform find opportunities in the pain points of traditional sole manufacturing industry and enter the golden period?

We are all talking about the slowdown in the growth rate of the entire shoe industry, and the golden age of soles is gone, mainly referring to the decline in profits of the entire sole enterprise. Through the above data, we have the intuitive impression that the entire footwear market has a slump in the economy, sluggishness, as a shoe sole industry practitioner or a new entrepreneur, the only thing that can change is the circulation link of China's sole industry, grafting Internet thinking to solve the pain points of the circulation market!

Wang Dong once pointed out that any industry will go through three stages: short supply, overcapacity, and maturity. And the process of overcapacity to maturity is bound to give birth to a large number of retailers. Obviously, the sole industry is no exception, and large brand cooperative manufacturers have a fixed source of orders, relying on excellent product technology, quality and reputation. However, most of China's small and medium-sized enterprises have lost old customers, and is it really impossible to solve the problem that new customers are difficult to find?

The essence of the industrial Internet such as sole B2B is a kind of project based on retail, using the Internet to optimize the supply chain, the current sole price is not transparent, but the profit is very thin, only direct to the end user can improve the profit margin, but for retail, the end-user experience is particularly important, then how should the sole B2B find the needs of users to better serve them?

For terminal procurement, the main pain points are: 1. Inefficient search for goods 2. Lagging service 3. Reputation crisis

If you want to really help users, the key is to make supply and demand matching more effective and find goods more convenient! Only in this way can users reduce costs and improve efficiency.

In addition, the standardization of the transaction process is another important point to improve the user experience. The purchase of soles is still in the original transaction stage, manual finding, inquiry, price comparison, sometimes need to find multiple distributors to meet the purchase needs of one time, plus the search channel is telephone. If you look for 10 soles, simply looking for goods and inquiries has already collapsed.

The B2B platform of shoe materials is different, with the help of intelligent matching technology and big data precipitated by its own industry resources, it can provide end users with fast and accurate search for goods with huge resource advantages and professional teams, and bring close integration and interaction of products-people-services, which will make the procurement process of end users more concise and meet the personalized service needs of end users.

In the past, the sole trading link was "supplier-dealer-buyer", and the real terminal was disconnected in the entire industry chain! This direct result is that product quality cannot be guaranteed, circulation efficiency is low, and terminal personalized needs cannot be well met.

In addition, the sole is very regional, the traditional offline logistics needs to go through the middle 3 logistics turns of "supplier-logistics transit company-distribution logistics company-middleman-distribution logistics company-buyer", and the process effect is that it needs to go through "supplier-logistics transit company-distribution logistics company-middleman-distribution logistics company-process processing plant-middleman-distribution logistics company-buyer".

Internet + sole represents a new economic form, but also has large logistics, raw materials, processing services and other value-added services, and supply chain finance has become the Internet + sole winning highland.

When it comes to Internet finance, it is easy to think of Taobao Huabei, Jingdong white stripe, and fat cat white stripe looking for steel, and all of this is related to the user credit system.

Double-cross each other? It's hard for everyone. The big data precipitation of Internet e-commerce can improve the circulation of capital chain by establishing user credit files (rating + blacklist).

Like most traditional industries, in the traditional trading of the sole industry, untrustworthy behavior is like rust eroding the operation of the chain. Flipping through Baidu casually, there are a lot of news about a certain shoe factory running away and the boss jumping off the building. On March 2015, 3, Guangzhou Shoe City even had a tragic case in which four shoe factory owners even cut shoe material stalls and finally jumped off buildings and fell to their deaths, and it was even more common for partners to flee with money.

This boils down to the frequent transactions in the sole industry, the verbal agreements between the two parties to the transaction are rarely signed, and the old customers are not to mention new customers. During the hot period of the industry, a serious lack of credit system was born, which directly caused the general financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises and the breaking of capital chains.

Due to the lack of transaction big data, the pale credit system, the lack of credit system of the entire industry, and the extremely low cost of player default, traditional industries are frequently contracted, resulting in mutual defense. In such rivers and lakes, everyone's business is difficult to do.

Internet e-commerce after 1.0 information exchange, 2.0 matching transactions, to the current 3.0 big data era, can be platform user transaction data credit precipitation, upstream suppliers to achieve value distribution, while better protect the interests of downstream customers, the entire industry chain can achieve a win-win situation.

Third, the layout status and development opportunities of the platform to cut into the field of shoe soles with B2B?

In the face of the above pain points, the sole Internet platforms deployed in this field are generally active in the following platforms:

In the B2B platform of shoe materials in this field, the service objects are mainly downstream shoe companies and middlemen, and the upstream links different shoe material supply roles (shoe material manufacturers, shoe material intermediaries). It is understood that the current shoe material B2B platform is in its infancy, in this active 14 shoe material B2B enterprises, comprehensive category trading B2B platform roughly 10, vertical category trading B2B platform has 4, which is mainly concentrated in 2016 online, it can be said that the current sole Internet is still in the initial stage (are matchmaking mode) official in addition to the speed gathering network released logistics and processing and other value-added services, information integration and matching services, shorten the efficiency of sole circulation, In this way, it can effectively solve the problem that downstream buyers can quickly find the goods they need, and can meet the one-stop procurement needs.

Different from other traditional industry B2B, shoe material B2B adopts PaaS rather than SaaS system, and prefers to directly use the function of finding goods and completing orders on the platform, which is more convenient and faster in user experience.

Comprehensive platforms have a long precipitation time, but the degree of specialization of the platform is insufficient and the activity is low. Emerging vertical platforms saw considerable growth in daily activity and order flow.

Sole is not a new Internet commodity, as one of the most important categories of shoe materials, in the major shoe material B2B platform occupies a large proportion, but the search function compared to the offline traditional mode although shortened circulation efficiency, the current major platform search technology in addition to keyword search only beautiful material and announced the upcoming launch of the sole plate of the speed cluster has a picture search function, picture matching technology is first used in B2C and major search engines, its search accuracy still needs to be further strengthened.

At this stage, the construction of the Internet platform of China's sole circulation market has just started, and when traditional industries borrow Internet + tools, they must not only do the problem of moving offline resources to online transactions, but also truly embed the essence of the industrial Internet: integration and cross-border rooted in the entire traditional industry where they are located, not only to achieve Internet informatization and dataization within the enterprise, but also to have the awareness of ecological thinking in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. The value of the platform is not only a transaction based on matchmaking or self-operation, but more on the basis of trading, derived from supply chain finance, logistics and other value-added services, truly integrating the productive service industry with transactions, and jointly promoting the healthy progress of China's footwear industry Internet.