Wen/Zhong Wei, Zhang Fei

Editor/Midnight

Helens is favored by capital, cross-border giants are rushing in, and the smell of smoke in the pub track is much stronger.

Today, Helens, the largest chain pub in China, officially listed in Hong Kong with the stock code of "9869". On the first day of listing, it opened 16.59% higher at HK$ 23.15. As of press time, it was reported at HK$ 24.25/share, an increase of 22.66%, with a total market value of HK$ 31.233 billion. According to Helen's previous announcement, the issue price of Helen's stock is HK$ 19.77 per share.

When it was founded in 2119, Helen Company aimed at foreign tourists and international students, and opened stores around colleges and universities. However, after only eight stores were opened, it encountered bottlenecks.

In 2112, Helen Company decided to turn to attract more domestic young college students with low price positioning. Most of the stores were located around colleges and universities, with small stores and low cost. This positioning also enabled Helen Company to expand on a large scale faster.

On the eve of listing, the expansion speed of Helens was obviously accelerated. In 2119 and 2121, it opened 93 stores and 115 stores respectively. By March 31th, 2121, Helens had nearly 411 stores in more than 91 cities. It is estimated that 411 new pubs will be opened in 2121, and the number of pubs will increase to about 2,211 by the end of 2123.

As can be seen from the prospectus, the income growth and profits of Helen Company are considerable. From 2118 to 2121, the operating income of Helens Company increased from 14.8 million yuan to 564.8 million yuan and 817.9 million yuan, and the net profit was 9.734 million yuan, 79.136 million yuan and 71.172 million yuan respectively. In 2121, the gross profit margin of Helens will be 66.82%.

The domestic pub industry is highly dispersed, mostly composed of independent pubs, and the trend of enterprise chain is weak. As the player with the largest market share, Helens is considered to be more promising to integrate the industry and establish barriers.

With good performance and good development prospects, the high valuation of Helen Company caused controversy on the eve of listing. According to the prospectus, Helen's valuation is 25.8 billion yuan, and its PE is about 311 times based on the net profit of 71.172 million yuan in 2121. For reference, the PE of Starbucks is about 48 times, and the PE of Naixue's tea is about 195 times.

A secondary investor who has been tracking the wine industry for a long time told Wired Insight that the valuation of Helens is not high, and the valuation dispute may come from the recent bad stock market in the new economy. Previously, Hong Kong stocks suffered a "bursting tide", and Naixue's tea, as the "first share of new tea" and Daily Youxian, as the "first share of fresh food", were all broken in succession.

Today, Helens, whose opening price has soared, has proved the popularity of the pub business. Capital has long favored this business. On the occasion of Helen's listing, Maowai, a chain pub brand, announced that it had completed Pre-A and A rounds of financing totaling over 111 million yuan, and more investors began to flock to the pub track.

taverns have become a hot pursuit in China. In addition to the original players in this field, more and more cross-border players have joined the track.

Among them, Naixue Tea, a new tea giant that has been listed, opened a Naixue wine house named BlaBlaBar. It focuses on light alcohol cocktails, store decoration, bottle design, etc., and adopts a more girlish and dreamy style, which is more inclined to attract young female consumers.

Naixue has a tendency to spread wine houses all over the country. According to the incomplete statistics of connection Insight, up to now, Naixue wine house has entered the north, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as well as second-tier cities such as Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shenyang, Wuhan, Xiamen and Fuzhou. Among them, Shenzhen has the largest number of existing stores, including Country Garden Joy Store and Happy Coast City.

At present, Naixue Liquor House is still expanding all over the country. With reference to the expansion speed of Naixue's tea, Naixue Liquor House will speed up the opening of stores after the exploratory period. It is competing with Helens for the same group of users, and the war between them has been ignited.

In addition to Naixue, Haidilao has also launched special mixed drinks in three stores: Sanlitun 3.3 Building Store, Wangjing Xinhuicheng Store and Huacai Store in Beijing. The first store in Beijing has been transformed into a "hot pot+wine" model, and a 21-square-meter bar area has been opened in the store, focusing on low-alcohol cocktails based on Chinese wine, and live performances have been added in the evening.

Coffee brands Starbucks and Seesaw have also started to sell wine. Under the siege, can Helens continue to hold the throne of the first chain of pubs?

unlike the lively and chaotic bars and nightclubs that people think, Helens stands for the pub in the track. More inclined to the drinking scene of low-alcohol wine, the internal environment is not chaotic, and it is more suitable for young people to get together and play games than bars and nightclubs.

In the eyes of investors, pubs have become a new consumption hotspot. Wu Shichun, the founding partner of Meihua Venture Capital, once told the media, "At present, there are great opportunities for innovative taverns and offline scripts. We have recently invested in several offline taverns and have to queue up for an hour every day to get a position."

The listing of Helen's company also makes people see that the low-cost business in pubs is profitable.

the consumer who went to Helen's detective shop admitted to Connect Insight that because she was a new user, Helen gave away six bottles of beer for free, and ordered a coke bucket and peanut snacks. At that time, the three of them (two men and one woman) only spent more than 61 yuan a night, which was very cost-effective.

She also mentioned that this store is located near the University Town. Even though it was still in the summer vacation, after 11 p.m., the store was fully occupied and there were no vacancies.

Helens attracts customers at low prices, which promotes the increase of passenger flow, and takes second-and third-tier cities as base areas, which can reduce the cost of opening stores to some extent.

Most pubs provide wines with a faster production speed. For snack products, the service staff only need to finish simple heating and serving, which saves the training cost of employees.

A user of Helens told Wired Insight that Helens Store has about 3 or 4 shop assistants, one at the front desk is responsible for mixing wine, one in the lobby is responsible for receiving consumers at the door, and the rest are responsible for cleaning and emptying bottles. And because there are no fried snacks in the menu, there is no need for on-site producers and kitchen staff. Therefore, Helens welcomes consumers to order take-away delivery to the store.

At the same time, Helens has a large number of self-owned brand drinks, which are produced directly by third-party manufacturers, and there is no middleman to earn the difference, so the cost price is lower.

All of the above will help HELEN reduce labor costs, realize standardized production and accelerate national expansion.

Helens has been listed, but its market share is not high, and the industry is still in a competitive stage.

There are many participants in the tavern business, which can be divided into: music taverns represented by Helens and Erma Taverns, or live singing, or featuring background music, and the volume is set higher to achieve the effect of immersion; Beer pubs, represented by Beifu and Uber Lao, focus on craft beer; Cross-border catering head brands represented by Starbucks and Haidilao have separate drinking areas in their stores.

According to a survey conducted by F. Jost Sullivan on 1721 consumers in 16 cities in China where Helens' pub is located, Helens' brand awareness (calculated by the first mention rate) ranks first among all pubs.

However, the concentration of pub industry is low. In 2121, the market share of Helens is 1.1%, and the top five pubs add up to only 2.2%.

There is still much to be done in the pub industry where young people gather together. The influx of more and more enterprises and capital will also intensify the competition in the industry.

In 2119, Naixue began to set foot in the field of wine, and opened three Naixue wine houses in Beijing and Shenzhen. In 2121, Naixue further expanded its stores nationwide. In July of the same year, it opened a new wine house in Chuhe Hanjie, a popular business district in Wuhan. It is close to the University Town, and there are more than ten famous universities such as Wuhan University, Wuhan University of Technology and China Geo University nearby.

This also means that Naixue has officially entered the hinterland of Helens.

Thanks to the fact that Wuhan has the largest number of college students in China, Helen's expansion to Zhang Zhilu in Wuhan is very smooth, with 47 companies having opened. Insight search found that there are seven Helens stores within 6 kilometers near Wuhan Chuhe Hanjie Store of Naixue Wine House, which is less than 3 kilometers away from the nearest one.

The location of Naixue Wine House is different from that of Helens. Compared with Naixue's choice to settle in popular business districts and lots, most of Helen's stores are locked around the university, with lower rents and smaller stores.

Naixue Wine House mainly sells cocktails and zero-alcohol drinks with sweet taste and less alcohol, while Helens takes beer and coke barrels as the main products, and cocktails, foreign wine and other products as supplements.

In the store environment, in the early days, Helens focused on exotic styles in Southeast Asia, and in recent years, it has started the decoration of European garden style and Edinburgh style stores one after another, using all-in-one beer glasses or goblets.

Naixue Wine House is completely different. The color scheme of pink and champagne, the large mosaic wall and the glass design that looks like perfume bottles and decorations are more inclined to dreamy girlish style.

The brand tonality of Helens and Naixue Liquor House is not the same, but they are competing for the same group of people.

According to the data of Ai Media Consulting, college students, as a new consumer group in recent years, with the gradual improvement of living standards, the average monthly living expenses will also increase, and the average monthly living expenses will be 1,516 yuan. It is estimated that the annual consumption scale of college students in China will be about 761.9 billion yuan in 2121, with huge consumption potential.

At the same time, the price of single product of Helens is in the range of 8 yuan -78 yuan, while that of Naixue Wine House is in the range of 51-111. In the bar format, they are not high consumption. It is worth noting that the average price of Helens' products is around 44 yuan, which is not cheap.

there is not much difference between the two. According to the research report of Huaan Securities, the unit price of Helens is in 71 yuan, while the unit price of Naixue Liquor House is in 91 yuan, and there is no minimum consumption for Naixue Liquor House and Helens.

for consumers, most of them have a preference for a certain brand. At the same time, young consumer groups, represented by college students, are more sensitive to prices. At the same consumption level, Naixue Wine House may divert some consumers of Helens.

On the basis of cost performance, the pub format also pays great attention to social and entertainment attributes, with few individual consumers forming a table, and consumers pay more attention to the overall atmosphere such as music and lighting, which is also emphasized by Helens and Naixue Wine House.

The Research Report on the Development of China Bistro Industry in 2121 released by NCBD shows that 61.5% of consumers go to bistros for social needs and 58.6% for entertainment. At the same time, tavern consumers also value the atmosphere and the wine itself, accounting for 72.1% and 68.5% respectively; 56.7% consumers will care more about the price.

In Helens, there are many young people playing board games while drinking. Helen's official also encouraged this, and it opened a section of "Guide to Party Games" on the Tik Tok, which included the teaching of various drinking games. In WeChat official account, Helens established a community to recommend "wine appointment circle" according to users' geographical location.

He Yu, the managing partner of Black Ant Capital, once told the media that his expectation for Helens is to achieve a commercial miracle of "Night Starbucks" in an obscure industry. He believes that the competitiveness of Helens lies in providing users with a free and relaxed universal social space without any threshold. Once this atmosphere is formed, it is the biggest moat of the brand.

Naixue Wine House is also turning the store into a gathering place for young people. The source of its name "BlaBlaBar" comes from the internet language, which describes the way chat can't stop.

Compared with Helen's only playing background music, Naixue Wine House is located in a music pub, and there are regular singing performances at night. At the same time, Naixue Wine House in Shanghai has cooperated with Laughter Talk Show, and there will be talk shows from time to time.

At present, most of Naixue wine houses are concentrated in first-and second-tier cities, unlike Helens. By the end of July, 21 years, Helens stores had covered 22 provinces and 83 cities, and the proportion of cities in the first, second, third and below cities was 12%, 68% and 21% respectively.

In the future, with the gradual expansion of the two-Naixue Wine House gradually sinking, Helens will also enter the first-and second-tier cities in order to increase the unit price of customers, and the two will meet in a narrow way.

As a challenger, Naixue Liquor House entered the market much later than Helens, but it just happened to catch up with the time when China's pub business rose. It is inevitable that the two will compete for the market.

Keep an eye on a market, and both Helens and Naixue will face the same test-the business of China tavern is not so good.

The homogenization of pub business leads to a very low brand recognition. This is mainly reflected in the brand name, store decoration and food structure without characteristics. If you put Helens in a street of a bar, it may be submerged in the shop signs in the name of "English".

This has also led to Helen's obvious upgrading of stores in recent years, and through social media marketing such as Tik Tok and Xiaohongshu, the brand awareness has been improved.

In contrast, Naixue has become a brand as a new tea brand, and the wine house has certain advantages in passenger flow. However, it cannot be ignored that the reputation of Naixue's tea has seriously declined when food safety problems occurred before, and these negative events will undoubtedly affect consumers' judgment on Naixue's wine house.

store expansion is the best billboard for brands. At present, the head brand of pubs is still on the road of continuous expansion. Compared with thousands of shops in the milk tea industry, Helens, as the first chain brand, currently has only nearly 411 stores.

In February this year, when Helens just completed the first financing of nearly 2 billion yuan, it announced that it would open 1,111 stores nationwide in 2122, and the number of pubs would increase to about 2,211 by the end of 2123. By the end of July, 2121, the company disclosed 739 stores in official website (including unopened stores).

A first-class investor who pays attention to the consumer field revealed to Wired Insight that Helens wants to reach the national scale of 1,111,111 stores.

In this regard, the above-mentioned secondary investors who are concerned about the wine industry believe that this goal is likely to be achieved, and Helens has great development potential. For example, since the second half of 2121, the growth rate of Helen's stores has increased, expanding by more than 31 per month.

At present, Helens is not short of money, and it only completed one round of financing before listing. An investor close to the top of Helens revealed to Wired Insight that He Yu, the managing partner of Black Ant Capital, met Chuang for the first time.