Self-service coffee machine ushered in industry integration! "Yika" acquires University Business of "Coffee Wharf"

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Coffee is gradually changing from imported goods to daily necessities.

Core hint:

The 100 billion-grade coffee market is still growing, and outside the target country, self-service coffee machines are still relatively blank.

Emphasize informationization and experience, and build barriers from equipment.

From the end of this year to the beginning of next year, the leading companies in the industry will appear.

Krypton learned that self-service coffee machine operator Yi Ka recently completed the acquisition of the university business of "Coffee Wharf". Earlier, Yijia just announced the completion of round A financing, with two rounds of financing totaling more than 100 million yuan in 2018. The Coffee Wharf is the earliest operation team to do mobile payment self-service coffee machine in China, which has completed Pre-A round financing.

Wang Jing, founder and chairman of Yika, said that unlike the main procurement equipment in the industry to operate, Coffee Wharf and Yika are the first two self-service coffee machines designed and produced independently. What they have in common is that they all focus on the university scene. Yika has stationed more than 100 schools across the country, ranking first in dozens of cities, while the coffee wharf has settled in more than 40 campuses of 31 universities in Shanghai alone, accounting for the first place in Shanghai.

This acquisition involves the university business of Coffee Terminal in many cities, including manpower, finance, administration, market development, spot, equipment, operation, management, etc., the two sides have not disclosed the details and amount of the transaction. The non-university business of the coffee terminal will still develop independently, and the two sides will form a strategic partnership, sharing channels and supply chains.

This is the first disclosed acquisition of the self-service coffee machine industry that we have observed. Wang Jing also told 36 krypton that with the gradual improvement of coffee shops, self-service coffee machines, coffee takeout and other formats, the coffee industry as a whole is moving upward, but the subdivision has begun to reshuffle. In the self-service coffee machine track, many players' business models have been unable to run and begin to withdraw this year. With this integration, the leading companies in the industry will show up from the end of this year to the beginning of next year.

Coincidentally, not long ago in 36 krypton to coffee zero bar CEO Wang Shun interview, he also mentioned: "this year and next year will usher in the industry reshuffle." Has the second half of the self-service coffee machine started quietly? How to build their own barriers? Is there any room for new entrants? What will the future look like? We were very interested in the above questions and took this opportunity to chat with Yika's founding team.

Coffee on the tuyere, a market of hundreds of billions of dollars

Luckin is menacing, Ali also has his eye on Starbucks to make takeout together, and this year's coffee is once again in the wind. In our report released in July, we mentioned that China's coffee consumption market is about 100 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 15% in the past 10 years, and compared with countries like Japan, where the food culture is relatively similar. The gap in the number of drinking cups per capita is about 40 times, the demand is far from saturated, and there is great potential for growth.

The self-service coffee machine discussed in this paper sprang up in China around 2015. with the expansion of coffee consumers, consumers have higher requirements for coffee quality. the self-service coffee machine belongs to freshly ground coffee, which is in line with this upgrading trend. and relatively easy to take out and eat, will cut off a large part of the coffee market. Outside the standard country, Europe's largest self-service coffee machine operator manages about 140000 devices. Japan had 170000 self-service coffee machines in 2015, while the number of domestic operators is still less than 10,000, mostly in Angel-A round. The general view of the market is that self-service coffee machines are still in the stage of cultivating consumption habits and grabbing space.

But Wang Jing, founder and CEO of Yika, told 36 Krypton that it is not that simple to judge. Self-service coffee machine is essentially to have its own hematopoietic ability, the industry has already begun to compete for operational details, the withdrawal point is precisely because some brands can not make a profit in a single scene. The main battlefield of Yika is in colleges and universities, because of the team's own background and resource advantages. at present, it has been operating for 3 semesters, has entered more than 100 universities, and has laid more than 1500 equipment in a completely self-supporting mode.

So where are the barriers to self-service coffee machines?

To dismantle the business, there are roughly several parts: equipment research and development, supply chain and operation and maintenance, point selection and BD, which determine the operational efficiency of the equipment. 36 Krypton also chatted with several leaders of Yika, as a two-year-old start-up team, their main advantages are: the entry and operating costs of a single device are low enough, the supply chain is stable enough, and the competitiveness in the segmentation scenario is ensured by optimizing the experience.

Here are some important details to demonstrate how they do the above.

Equipment: technical changes can be divided into internal and external aspects. Internal: for example, in the process of adding materials, the traditional weighing method has insufficient accuracy and serious loss, and needs to be corrected frequently. Yika has developed the core components to support image recognition, and it is up to the machine to judge the material requirements and reduce the cost of operation and maintenance.

External: in addition to ensuring the stability of the equipment, Yika has also tested functions such as face recognition, voice interaction and on-screen comment interaction. Eka CTO Chen Xu told 36 krypton that the self-service coffee machine is mostly a repeat customer business, and the core is to make coffee consumption insensitive and use a variety of technologies to give users a sense of freshness. For example, in addition to supporting payment, face recognition records user consumption data and interacts with the user on the next arrival; for example, real-time interaction between machines allows consumers to socialize lightly when buying coffee. In the following semester, Yijia will push face payment to improve the payment experience. Become the country's first large-scale commercial application face payment offline operation team.

Supply chain and operation and maintenance: at present, Yika already has a 5000 mu exclusive plantation in Yunnan, ensuring a stable supply of coffee beans. Xu Zhi, the person in charge, said that as long as it is not handmade on the spot, it is actually the roasting process that further affects the taste of coffee. Yika cooperated with the famous roaster in this respect. In terms of operation and maintenance, first of all, there are intensive deployment sites. In Tsinghua Park, where the operation of Yika is more mature, the number of equipment is more than 100, and one person can complete the maintenance of 40 equipment a day, greatly reducing the cost.

Site selection and BD: Yika first laid equipment in Tsinghua University, and had a better understanding of the needs and invisible threshold on campus, and its strategy was to give priority to the vertical scene of the school. Wang Sheng, the person in charge, told 36 Krypton that there are 40 million people in the university environment across the country, which is already a half-and-a-half Taiwan market. It can also be used as an entrance to offline traffic to reach accurate users. It has a very high ceiling.

In the campus scene, Yika's strategy is to launch and then test. Due to the lighter equipment (130 kg) and low delivery cost, Yika will test for about a week at the point where there is a demand, and then continue to operate after reaching a certain trading volume.

500 devices will be a watershed, and acquisitions may be more frequent

In addition to the supply chain and scene expansion, another point of concern is that head players are no longer satisfied with doing point-by-point games and begin to pay attention to brand building. For example, Yi Ka's slogan from "freshly ground coffee"-"anytime and anywhere coffee"-"make communication interesting" tells light social stories and prepares for a multi-scene layout, hoping to become a new consumer brand that occupies the minds of users.

From the perspective of the market environment, Wang Jing told 36 krypton that the overall growth rate of coffee is very good, everyone is working together to cultivate consumption habits, coffee is gradually transitioning from imported goods to daily necessities, and the increase in consumption frequency will be helpful to all formats in this market. As mentioned earlier, the domestic self-service coffee machine is still relatively primary, the growth space is very huge, only from this point of view, new players still have a lot of high-quality points to dig.

However, Wang Jing believes that from the experience of the industry, 500 Taiwan will become an important watershed, on top of which, the difficulty of management has increased significantly and tested the ability of an enterprise to continue to expand. Over the past few years, the accumulation in the upstream supply chain, as well as the exploration of point-to-point model, make Yika have about two peak seasons of the first-mover advantage, the acquisition will further widen the gap. The coffee industry is getting a lot of attention now, and acquisitions may be more frequent in the coming period of time.

This also means that the operation of self-service coffee machines can turn into a "small and beautiful" business, but in order to complete cross-scene and cross-regional replication and become part of the tip of the pyramid, the war situation may soon be clear to us.

END