TRADE TALK Suning
TRADE TALK Suning Rolls-Out Unmanned Stores in China Suning Commerce Group has announced to open four new unmanned automated stores in China, close to the country’s largest annual shopping spree, the “11/11 Shopping Festival”. After rolling out the first self-service store “Suning Sports Biu” in Nanjing last August, Suning launched its second cashier-less store in Shanghai the following week. More stores were to be opened in Beijing, Chongqing and Xuzhou. With richer product categories, the new stores will not only sell sports products and souvenir items of wellknown football clubs, such as F.C. Internazionale Milano, consumers could also find gadgets, personal electronics, food and FMCG goods to fulfil more unique purchasing demands. “The ‘Biu’ store is the latest innovation of Suning’s ‘Smart Retail’,” said Zhang Jindong, Chairman of Suning Holdings Group. “Suning has more than 1,500 brick-and-mortar stores which have been upgraded to big data-driven smart stores years ago. With extensive offline experience and advantages in O2O retail, Suning’s unmanned store model has undergone the concept and trial stages, and is now ready to scale up. These stores are launched for business, and are reproducible, cost-wise and technology-wise. As today’s techsavvy consumers expect different shopping experience, we see more opportunities in the industry and Suning is dedicated to create best services for our customers,” convinced Zhang. Powered by facial recognition technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), big data analysis and its owned online financial services, Suning’s unmanned stores offer a frictionless shopping and a paying process quicker than other similar stores to optimize the user experience. Highlights include: FACIAL RECOGNITION After linking a bank card and going through the facial recognition on Suning Finance app, customers will be able to enter the store simply by letting the camera scan their faces at the entrance. A customer walks through the self-service check-out area at the Suning unmanned store EFFORTLESS SHOPPING EXPERIENCE To check out, shoppers only need to carry their goods along the payment pathway. The system will automatically recognize the shoppers and their items with the facial recognition and RFID technology – making the entire check-out process shorter than 15 seconds. CUSTOMER TRAFFIC AND FLOW ANALYSIS The surveillance cameras and an algorithm system developed by Suning is used to calculate and analyse customer flow in the stores to help optimize the product placement and enhance the shop operation. With its years of experience in running approximately 4,000 self-managed stores and outlets targeting on different communities, Suning plans to expand its offerings of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) in the unmanned stores to cover more diversified product lines. The unmanned stores will also feature Augmented Reality (AR) technology to display creative items, optimising the space usage Tmall Genie Reading Medicine Box ALIBABA A.I. LABS LAUNCHES ALIGENIE 2.0 Alibaba A.I. Labs has announced the launch of “AliGenie 2.0”. The updated human – computer interaction system will enable Tmall Genie X1, the Labs’ first smart speaker with visual recognition capability, to scan and read over 100 sets of children’s books as well as 40,000 medicine boxes. Alibaba A.I. Labs is a leader in the development of AI-powered consumer applications and products in Alibaba Group. The visual-recognition capability is achieved through “Genie FireEye”, a new function in Tmall Genie’s mobile app. The function is activated by scanning a QR code that comes with a phone holder “XHolder”. It then uses the front-facing camera in a user’s cell phone to scan the cover and read the children’s books by leveraging the image-processing and visualrecognition capabilities of AliGenie TMALL CELEBRATES TEN YEARS’ OPERATION April 2018 marked the tenth anniversary for Tmall.com, formerly Taobao Mall, a spin-off of Alibaba Group. Tmall.com currently features more than 70,000 international and Chinese brands from more than 50,000 merchants and serves more than 180 million buyers. Tmall.com is the largest business-to-consumer (B2C) retail platform in Asia enabling businesses to sell directly to millions of consumers throughout China. As an open platform marketplace, Tmall.com provides the infrastructure for sellers to host storefronts and unfiltered access to hundreds of millions of shoppers 6
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Jens Heithecker IFA Executive Director & Messe Berlin Vice-President Setting Course for Success IFA Executive Director and Messe Berlin Vice-President Jens Heithecker – on this year’s CE China event How is CE China progressing and what will be new this year? We put the question to “the man at the helm”. Two years ago, we established CE China and we knew right from the start that we had a completely different focus to any other show, and that it would be a long way. At the same time, we told you CE China is not a copy of IFA. It’s not a copy in terms of size, it’s not a copy by name, nor by other points. It is however a prolongation of IFA for the Chinese market. This year, we will have the same size as last year – one large hall at the Shenzhen exhibition centre. And we are proud that we have been able to fill it with more western brands than before, but even more Chinese brands. It means we focus on quality, because CE China for us means being different to any other show – being a highquality show with a high efficiency rate. Talking about efficiency, that’s where there is the biggest difference to last year, we are introducing a new format, called CE China Retail University. It has a clear intention. We learned that Chinese retail is not so familiar on the one hand with the real brand stories, with the real product backgrounds of the brand industry. And on the other, we learned that the contact the brand industry has with the individual retailers is not the closest because it’s such a huge country. So, we introduced a format like the briefings we already developed for other events at IFA. We introduced this in China with a focus of the largest retailer, Suning, bringing in more than 500 retailers from stores around China, and on the other side, the brands will have the opportunity, in a short presentation, to say what they stand for, and how the retail can be successful with them. That’s what we mean with efficiency, bringing into contact, in the best way, the Chinese retail with the western industry. What else differentiates this show? Compared to big shows in China, it’s the clear focus and smaller size. You have some huge shows. But these are in part political shows. We are a commercial show only. We are organised by western organisers with no political influence, but we come in with our experience from Berlin, how to organise a successful business case for our exhibitors and for the retailers, even if the size is small. It’s about being relevant for the main actors in the market, and not having the biggest size. Just a few years ago, you were only operating a show in Europe, but now you work in China, and also this year in the USA. What’s the philosophy of Messe Berlin with regard to entering other markets such as this? We changed our strategy a few years ago from being the European IFA to being the Global IFA. That means not only we are in close contact with the industry and headquarters around the world; it means also that we are in close contact with retailers and that we understand the most important global markets. That’s why we went to China – the largest single market in the world, and we built-up a network we never had before – getting networked with retailers, getting networked with top management of the retailer, with the top management of the industry, and not to underestimate it, getting to understand the differences of the market in China compared to Europe and the rest of the world. If you want to be a global show, you must understand the most important global markets. [AT THE POWER BRIEFINGS] THE BRANDS WILL HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY, IN A SHORT PRESENTATION, TO SAY WHAT THEY STAND FOR, AND HOW THE RETAIL CAN BE SUCCESSFUL WITH THEM. This understanding helps us quite a lot for IFA in Berlin. We can help out the industry and retail in China with our knowledge, and start to transfer this knowledge to China, we have a successful business case in the future CE China Daily • Thursday 26 th April 2018 7
