Gome Sports Experience "Growing Pains"

Gome Holdings Group entered the field of sports sales, suffered "growing pains".

In June 8th, Meng Lei, director of sports operation of Gome, said that over the past six months, Gome Sports General Manager Li Yan and Zhang Li, director of sports brand, left Gome sports.

At the beginning of June, Li Yan and Zhang Li separately disclosed the resignation message to the outside world, and said that "leaving the post is for personal reasons".

The two men's resignation attracted many conjectures.

Among them, the core point lies in whether Gome sports executives quit is a collective behavior and whether Gome sports can replicate the rapid development mode of Gome.

Meng Lei said, "their resignation belongs to the normal flow of personnel in the enterprise, not right.

Meng Lei acknowledged that Gome sports did adjust the pace of opening stores.

No copying of electrical appliances

Meng Lei believes that Gome sports experience can be used for reference. In the course of development, it is normal to encounter such a problem.

In January 18th, Huang Xiuhong, President of Gome Holdings Group, announced that the Gome sports program opened 27 new stores in Beijing before the end of 2011, and the annual sales target was 1 billion yuan. In the next 5 years, it plans to build 100 stores in the country and gradually build Gome sports into a large professional chain store with the same influence as Gome.

However, Gome sports has so far not speeded up.

Up to now, Gome sports, founded in late 2009, still has only one.

In view of the reasons, Meng Lei said that the current futures supply system in the sporting goods industry can not keep up with the pace of opening stores.

The way of supply for futures needs to be ordered six months in advance, which will lead to errors in the rhythm of opening stores.

At present, more and more brands are beginning to understand and agree with the way of Gome sports. Gome sports has established cooperative relations with Lining, Pathfinder, acme, Kang, Jian, Giant, and so forth.

At the same time, Gome Sports

Unlike Gome, that is, the way of supply, that is, the sale of sporting goods, especially sportswear, most of them adopt futures system, which is more consistent with the operation of brand dealers and agents.

Gome sports hopes to build a sports chain hypermarket to achieve point to point cooperation among manufacturers, so as to save supply chain costs.

"Naked gold mine" {page_break}

According to the statistics of China Academy of industry research, the sales volume of China's sporting goods industry reached 111 billion yuan in 2009, and the annual compound growth rate of sports industry will remain above 20% in 2010 -2013.

Huang Xiuhong also said, "China's sports industry is a bare gold mine".

At present, there are three main forms in the sporting goods retailing industry, one is the comprehensive flagship store invested by the brand manufacturers and the whole series of sports products are sold by the single brand. One is the comprehensive sports city opened by the sporting goods retailer, with many brands as one, and the brand is more complete, but the single brand of goods is concentrated in some categories by the store display; one is the giant MALL of Decathlon type and has more than 5000 series of products, solving the one-stop procurement problem.

Sports marketing expert Ma Gang believes that at the product level, Gome sports and Baosheng, BELLE and other sporting goods distributors are quite different, and French Decathlon is the biggest opponent of Gome sports.

By the end of 2010, Decathlon had opened 26 stores in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dalian, Chengdu, Tianjin and so on. Its future plan is to set up nearly a thousand stores through 20 years or so.

Meng Lei said, the Gome sports retail mode is different from the brand agent's exclusive store mode, also is different from Decathlon's own brand management mode, but by optimizing the supply chain to achieve innovation, sports products consumption and sports training and promotion of sports organically integrated sports retail mode.

But he said frankly, "it's difficult to start, but we believe innovation is the driving force."