The founder committed suicide, coffee is difficult to revive with you.

In the past two years, the well-known brand of Korean coffee has accompanied you with negative, and it is difficult to expand. On July 24, Coffee accompanied your founder Kang Hoon to commit suicide in South Korea. Some analysts pointed out that Jiang Xun committed suicide because it was difficult to bear the pressure caused by the company's operational difficulties and financial crisis. In China, the ups and downs of coffee accompany you on the road of expansion, which also exposes a variety of difficulties in the joining and control of enterprises. The industry believes that at present, the scale of coffee with you in China is shrinking, and with the news of the death of the founder, the goal of thousands of coffee stores will be greatly affected.

Coffee shrinks with you

Kang Hoon, a representative of KH, which owns the title of "coffee king" in South Korea and created coffee with you, Holly Coffee and Mangosix, committed suicide at home on the afternoon of July 24, South Korean time, according to sources. The police claimed that Jiang Xun had sent text messages to friends to express his current state of exhaustion, and that he had applied for a corporate revival procedure in the hope of changing the company's current operating difficulties.

Jiang Xun's suicide, let coffee accompany you to change the status quo efforts have uncertainty. Does this incident have any impact on the Chinese market? A reporter from Beijing Business Daily visited a number of coffee shops in downtown Beijing on July 29, which are still in normal operation. At around 9 p.m., there are still many customers in the store, and some clerks don't know much about the news that coffee accompanied your founder's suicide, which doesn't seem to have had an impact on the Chinese market.

However, when a reporter from the Beijing Business Daily inquired about Dianping and other evaluation websites, he found that the scale of coffee accompany you is shrinking. A number of stores that were still evaluated by consumers at the beginning of the year have been marked as closed. Not only the Beijing market, but also many coffee shops in Shanghai have been marked as closed.

Prior to this, there has been an endless stream of negative news about coffee accompanying you in China. Since mid-2015, Coffee has first encountered the biggest crisis in China, from infighting among Chinese and Korean shareholders to CEO Qi Dong's public resignation letter, mentioning that Coffee's Chinese shareholders stopped making unilateral capital advances three months ago. Some employees even said that the wages of nearly 10 million yuan for more than 160 employees in your headquarters were in arrears for several months, and the company's capital chain was seriously broken. Then, in late May 2015, the Beijing Business Daily received the revelation of the coffee franchisee who accompanied you. A total of more than 300 franchisees paid 500000 yuan per person to coffee with you, a total of 150 million yuan of intention money, and this intention money is faced with the problem of irrecoverable. In 2016, some Shandong consumers complained to the Beijing Business Daily that the stored value card he had issued was about to be scrapped as a result of the coffee closing down with you. A series of problems make it even more difficult for coffee to accompany your business.

Hidden dangers caused by lack of control

Coffee, which once showed a high growth trend in China, has triggered a discussion in the industry about the pattern of the coffee market. However, the short duration of this trend is beyond the expectation of many people. In this regard, it has been pointed out that the rapid expansion of coffee with you may be one of the reasons for the hidden trouble. Behind this rapid expansion, you are still faced with the situation that the membership card is not universal, the service quality of different stores is different, and even the franchisee stores are fighting on their own behind this rapid expansion. and all these have seriously dragged down the reputation of coffee accompanying you in China.

What is more serious is that the individual joining mode used when coffee accompanies you to join also makes the management and control of the enterprise seem weak. Previously, a coffee franchisee who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Beijing Business Daily that after joining Coffee to accompany you, in addition to the early site selection, equipment procurement and staff training, the operation of the store is basically independent, and the purchase of food raw materials is mostly carried out through its own channels. It can be said that joining Coffee to accompany you is to buy this brand and attract popularity in the early days of the store through the influence of the brand. A high degree of liberalization means that coffee accompanies you lack of control over its franchisees, further making it difficult to control the quality of the brand. As a result, consumers often criticize the completely different experience of coffee in different stores on the relevant review sites.

Some analysts have also pointed out that the way coffee accompanies you to allow franchisees to grow freely has greatly reduced the cost of default for franchisees, which is not only one of the reasons for the escape of Korean coffee franchisees represented by you, but is more likely to lead to the emergence of fake stores because of the lack of control.

In the view of the industry, the joining model has its development bottleneck: on the one hand, it is difficult to form an unbreakable common relationship between brand enterprises and franchise stores, and the performance of brand enterprises has a ceiling. On the other hand, due to the weak supervision in the later stage, it is difficult for the brand enterprises to control the actual operation of the franchise stores, which also leads to the mistrust of the franchisees to the brands.

Want to "de-Han" to survive

The dilemma of coffee with you is not alone. In recent years, major Korean coffee brands in China have been faced with varying degrees of business problems. Some brands even hope to get rid of the bad reviews caused by many negative news of Korean caffeine by means of "de-Koreanization". The means are usually to move closer to the local operation, or even to give up the franchise mode.

Take Zoo Coffee as an example. Jin Jianyou, chairman of Zoo Coffee, said in response to the runaway incident to Beijing Business Daily that he would expand in China in a direct mode in the future. However, there is also a view that Zoo Coffee giving up to be a straight camp can really put an end to the chaos of joining, but it will also encounter financial pressure for a long time. Franchise revenue used to be the core income, it is relying on a large number of franchisees, zoo coffee can complete the rapid expansion. Take the continued expansion of 70-80 stores this year as an example, after abandoning the franchise model, Zoo Coffee not only lost this part of the franchise fee, but also invested the same amount to expand direct stores.

Not only that, the previous popularity of Korean coffee is partly due to the popularity of Korean Wave in China to attract consumers. Coffee accompanies you to use Zhang Genshuo, Kim Soo-Hyun and other popular Korean TV series protagonists as brand image spokesmen to attract customers. However, in the case of the general cooling of the Korean Wave in the past two years, "de-Koreanization" seems to be more able to expand the audience and avoid the limitations of Korean labels on the long-term operation of the brand. There is a view that Korean Coffee hopes to make more exploration in localization, rather than just rely on attracting fans to operate.

It is worth noting that at present, there are many active coffee brands in the Chinese market and the competition is fierce. Not only the coffee accompanies you, the original and more and more Korean coffee brands newly entering China, the competition between each other is also becoming more and more homogenized. Not only that, in the domestic first-and second-tier cities also occupy a relatively stable market position of Starbucks, COSTA and other European and American coffee brands, the financial strength of these brands and market reputation and other advantages are more obvious, while Starbucks and other brands also continue to infiltrate into the third-and fourth-tier city market to compete more directly with Korean coffee. Coupled with the continuous emergence of Chinese local coffee brands, the competitive pressure of Korean coffee brands, including coffee accompany you, will continue to increase.