Taoli Bread was established in the 1990s. After more than 20 years of development, it has become a nationally renowned enterprise integrating the production and sales of baked goods such as bread, moon cakes, and rice dumplings. Currently, the company has established production bases in 17 regions in China and has 220,000 sales terminals.
In March this year, Taoli Bread announced its 2018 performance report. The report shows that the company achieved revenue of 4.833 billion yuan last year, a year-on-year increase of 4.833 billion yuan. Among them, the net profit was 642 million, a year-on-year increase of more than 20%, and the performance was outstanding. At present, the company's market value has exceeded 30 billion yuan (as of August 30), and it has strong strength. However, the success of Taoli Bread is inseparable from the business wisdom of founder Wu Zhigang.
Wu Zhigang, who was born in the 1930s, experienced an era of chaos and turmoil. After peacetime entered, he resumed his studies and earned a university degree. After graduation, he was assigned to work as a telegraph operator in the local telecommunications bureau. He quit the job because it didn't interest him.
Many entrepreneurs in China started their own businesses when they were still confused, such as Ren Zhengfei of Huawei and Liang Qingde of Galanz. However, there are very few people who start a business in their sixties, and Wu Zhigang is one of them. In the mid-1990s, Wu Zhigang officially retired at the age of 60. Generally speaking, that time was the time to enjoy family happiness, but he was unwilling to live such a dull retirement life. At that time, the domestic sea-going trend was sweeping across the country, and he took this opportunity to embark on a business trip.
At that time, Wu Zhigang saw bakeries everywhere on the street. Although the industry is in full swing, the market is quite chaotic. He saw a business opportunity here. Why not set up a company to be the leader in the bread industry? So he founded a bakery called Taoli. In order to gain a foothold in the market, Wu Zhigang proposed a new strategy, which won the recognition of many consumers. In just two years, he won a place in the Liaodong market and officially kicked off the glorious beginning of peach and plum bread.
After that, in addition to focusing on freshness, Wu Zhigang also put forward the business philosophy of whether the product is expensive or not. It is reported that the Taoli bread series has never exceeded 5, and the total number of products has never exceeded 30. On the other hand, the unique taste of the product has won excellent reputation among users, resulting in a very high repurchase rate. With this, Taoli Bread quickly occupied a large number of markets. By 2005, it had become the largest fresh bread manufacturer in the Northeast, and Wu Zhigang became the real bread king in the Northeast.
After that, under the leadership of Wu Zhigang, Taoli Bread began a national strategy based on the Northeast market and rapidly expanded to surrounding markets. It is worth mentioning that the company's business model is different from other companies, adopting the "central factory wholesale" model for production and sales. Large-scale production greatly reduces production costs, forming a virtuous cycle, and the company can develop rapidly.
In addition, the company is very cautious in launching new products and adopts pilot promotion methods to reduce trial and error costs. In other words, we should try to sell in a certain region for 4-6 months, eliminate backward products by analyzing data, copy successful products to other regions for promotion, and ultimately achieve the function of optimizing the product structure.
When Taoli Bread was successfully launched, 80-year-old Wu Zhigang surpassed many real estate developers and became the richest man in Shenyang. According to the latest "2019 Hurun Global Rich List" and "Family Wealth", Wu Zhigang has reached US$2.6 billion, equivalent to approximately 18.6 billion yuan.