Electricity dealer price war electric quotient collective "self-inflicted"?

Recently, a number of platform-like electricity prices war intensified, whether it is the Internet origin of the Jingdong, the cat, or http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/8150.html "> traditional industries involved in Suning, Gome, All sacrifice The price war this "kill 10,000 self damage 8,000" magic weapon. Although some commentators believe that the electrical business should pay more attention to their own services, rather than relying solely on price war, but I am afraid that the electrical business, because of the attractiveness of consumers is a lot of "cheap" (in contrast to the offline, the reason is to omit a lot of labor, venues, utilities and other such costs), the price confrontation is generally unavoidable.

But the cost of electricity is not low--I sometimes feel that being a power trader is less expensive than opening a shop online--there are two parts of it that cost more than the offline shop. One is logistics costs. Consumers go to the bottom of the shop cost is borne by the consumer, buy the goods also have their own ideas to carry back. However, the amount of mail to attract consumers, in essence, is the cost of the original consumer to pass on to their own head. The second part of the fee is a yell. This message from the "full 30 percent" of the electric dealer will need to be paid again for enough people to see. In the external advertising input, the electric dealer is far more than the offline shop willing to spend money.

The real advantage of electric dealers is that "shelves are infinite"--this is also the "Long Tail theory" of Anderson's pen. The platform class such as the electric dealer if opens the shop under the line, estimated 10 floors to be unable to fight (for instance the cat has claimed to have 60,000 sellers). For each additional item, just add one page. The more goods, the lower the cost of publicity. This is one of the reasons why offline stores are less likely to advertise on such a large scale: thin publicity costs are limited. However, there is no trade in light goods is clearly the task of finishing the cost of publicity, the electrical business must stimulate consumers to come to their own website and buy goods. The best way is to have a price war.

However, the price wars of Chinese electricity dealers make their gross profit margins very low. Some media recently quoted an electric business personage's argument, Jingdong's gross profit margin but slows. Although the Chinese electric industry collective Amazon as a division, but the latter's gross profit margin has been more than 20% (even the most difficult to be referred to by the overpowered of the loss of age). For Chinese power suppliers, the pursuit seems more focused on the "scale"-that is, sales. This size is directly related to company valuations and future listings.

After a company goes public, it has to be cautious before it uses the price war, under pressure from the open market and quarterly earnings. In the Chinese market, a slightly larger list of listed electric companies (such as when), the price war is defensive. And the article first mentioned a number of platform-like electric dealers, no one listed, price war is offensive. I can even say that, before they go public, the price war confrontation will always be the norm, not the intermittent "promotional campaign."

Will the price wars of the electric dealers not be able to withstand the eventual collapse? I am not so pessimistic. Even the most aggressive of the price wars in Jingdong, as long as the management is not out of control, will not trigger a crash. Several major platform-like electric dealers, in fact, have kidnapped many investors, has come to the "big but not dead" stage. PPG Total rout is due to the quality of the loss of control, the executive layer of collective exodus, from the current situation, platform-like electric dealers do not have such a sign.

The consequence of the price war is to increase the speed of the monopoly, but also for the successor set a very high threshold for entry: Not enough strength (I think all is billion equivalent level of funds), do not play platform class. Each round of price wars will point to a result: the industry shuffle. From this point of view, if one day burst "every customer and a platform type of electricity quotient merger" news, I am not surprised.