Lele Tea sells her body: Hey Tea doesn’t want it, Naixue takes over

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Text/Sun Pengyue

Source/Zinc Finance (ID: xincaijing)

In the cold winter, the new tea drinking track has been bustling for a long time.

On December 5, Naixue announced that it had completed the investment agreement for Lele Tea (Shanghai Chatian Catering Management Co., Ltd.), and acquired a 43.64% stake in Lele Tea for 525 million yuan.

According to the announcement, Naixue’s Tea’s acquisition of Lele Tea will be carried out in two steps, including the share transfer part of 325 million yuan and the capital increase part of 200 million yuan. At the same time, Nayuki emphasized that the funds used for this acquisition came entirely from the company, and did not use the funds raised during the IPO.

When the transaction is completed, Lele Tea will become an associate company of Naixue’s Tea and will not merge the two brands. Lele Tea will keep its brand, team and operation unchanged.

It is worth mentioning that in July last year, Lele Tea was rumored to be acquired by Hey Tea and Yuanqi Forest, and the estimated price at that time was 4 billion yuan. This time, Nayuki’s Tea bought 43.64% of the shares with only 525 million yuan, which is undoubtedly a “bottom-buying” acquisition.

The feedback from the secondary market was strong. As of the close on December 5, Naixue’s stock price rose by more than 17%, setting a new high for the year.

Lele tea has a bad year

Lele Tea, established in Shanghai in 2016, is at the beginning of the new tea drinking track. With the high quality of products and the sense of space experience in stores, the new tea drink has realized the subversion of traditional milk tea, attracting the attention of the market and capital Put it on the new tea drinking track.

When Lele Tea opened its first store, it was less than four months after Heytea received 100 million yuan in Series A financing. At that time, Heytea Nayuki did not enter Shanghai, which left Lelecha with valuable development time. Lele Tea chose the business model of “milk tea + European bag”. This 1+1>2 model gained more market enthusiasm at that time.

In 2017, Lele Tea became popular with “dirty bags” and became a very popular Internet search term at that time. Not only did Lele Tea complete the accumulation of original fans, but also other new tea brands followed suit, greatly expanding brand awareness. Then in 2018, Lele Tea continued the dirty series and launched “Dirty Tea” to break the circle again, making Lele Tea truly become the leading player in the new tea drinking track.

Lele Tea, which is at its peak, has attracted the attention of various capitals. According to Tianyancha: from 2019 to 2020, Lele Tea has carried out 4 rounds of financing, but only the A round of financing in April 2019 announced the specific amount, about 200 million RMB. Pusi Capital, a subsidiary of Wang Sicong, also participated in the financing of Lele Tea.

With hundreds of millions of yuan in financing, Lele Tea has begun to expand wildly. From 2019 to 2020, it will successively open stores in Xi’an, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Chengdu, Chongqing, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Tianjin, and Shenzhen. The stores are located in South China, North China, Northwest China, Southwest and other regions.

The layout of blooming everywhere planted the seeds of insufficient stamina, and Lele Tea began to gradually lag behind Heycha Naixue in terms of supply chain and marketing. At the same time, the same dirty tea and dirty bags made consumers lose the freshness of Lele tea. The new products launched later, “Qingqing Oolong”, “Rouge Latte”, “Grape Matcha” and “Osmanthus Mo”, no matter from the name The product formula and cup pattern design are all highly similar to Chayanyuese’s “Shengsheng Oolong”, “Youlan Latte”, “Matcha Portuguese Tea” and “Osmanthus Nong”.

New products have repeatedly been caught in plagiarism, and there are shortcomings in product development. It can be seen that Lele Tea has taken a detour, obsessed with expansion and lost the innovative ability of the brand, and its presence in the new tea track is getting lower and lower.

Finally, in the second half of 2021, the unbearable Lele Tea began to close its stores, successively closing stores in Guangzhou, Chongqing, Xi’an and other places. Lele Tea officially stated: temporarily closing stores in other regions is to concentrate on the East China market; the company has plans to return to the currently closed markets.

Looking at it now, Lelecha did not have the strength to come back, and chose to sell herself.

Heycha Nayuki is ready to move

Lelecha has had a rough time in the past two years.

According to the announcement, in 2020 and 2021, the main business income of Lele Tea will be 728 million yuan and 870 million yuan respectively, the losses will be 20 million yuan and 18 million yuan respectively, and the net asset value will be 194 million yuan and 182 million yuan respectively. .

In addition to successive years of operating losses, Lele Tea’s last financing record also stayed in July 2020, and the specific amount is unknown. The past two years have been the period of crazy expansion of Lele Tea. Lele Tea and its founder Guo Nan are burdened with huge debts (260 million yuan).

Although Lele Tea has been losing money for years, bearing huge debts, and gradually falling behind in the new tea drinking track, it still has an advantage, that is, Lele Tea, which was established in Shanghai, is not inferior to Heycha Naixue in the Shanghai area.

According to public data: Up to now, Lele Tea has only a few hundred stores nationwide, but it still has about 60 stores in Shanghai, which is comparable to Heycha Naixue.

Relying on its dominant position in Shanghai and East China, Lele Tea’s “selling itself” has attracted the attention of many people.

In July 2021, there were rumors that Heytea and Yuanqi Forest wanted to acquire Lele Tea. The two parties valued the channel value of Lele Tea very much and gave a valuation of 4 billion yuan. Among them, HEYTEA has the highest degree of acquisition completion.

According to Titanium Media reports: HEYTEA has a very strong intention to acquire Lele Tea. First, it contacted Lele Tea through Black Ant Capital and paid a “deposit” of 200 million yuan to show its sincerity. However, at the subsequent shareholder communication meeting, Nie Yunchen, the founder of HEYTEA, had a conflict with Lele Tea. Nie Yunchen became emotional and insulted.

Later, Nie Yunchen publicly denied the acquisition of Lele Tea in the circle of friends: “The news is not true. I did have contact with him for a period of time through the introduction of an intermediary, but I have completely, completely and resolutely given up after understanding the internal situation, business data and status.”

Under Nie Yunchen’s attitude of “thoroughly, completely, and resolutely giving up”, Lele Tea also responded: “Currently developing independently, operating in good condition, and has no plans to be acquired, I will do my job well and live up to the trust of consumers. .”

Although Xicha was sent away, Lelecha still welcomed Naixue.

In order to acquire Lele Tea, Naixue took out an amount exceeding 14% of the book cash, which can be described as “full of sincerity” compared with Hey Tea’s “complete, complete, and resolute abandonment”.

According to the transaction document information, 260 million yuan of the 525 million investment fund is used to repay the loan, helping Lele tea to avoid measures such as creditors applying to freeze properties, which will affect the normal operation of Lele tea; secondly, Guo Nan’s team and investors can also Obtaining a cash return of no more than 32.5 million yuan in total cash can be regarded as letting the predecessor start well and end well.

In addition, Naixue will also provide Lele Tea with operating capital and business support, and provide operating loans with a total amount of no more than 80 million yuan in installments, which will be included in the total investment price of 525 million yuan; and The advantages in store expansion, supply chain, digitalization and automation, internal management and other aspects empower Lele Tea.

It seems that Naixue is a good “white knight” for Lelecha who is forced to sell herself.

The new tea drinking track continues to roll in

This year, Naixue has made a lot of moves, successively investing in coffee, bakery and tea brands such as Australian Coffee, Monster Sleepy, Cranesuo, and Tea Yiji.

Then Nayuki started the brand upgrade for the seventh anniversary, modifying the name and LOGO. The Chinese signboard “Nayuki の茶” containing Japanese vocabulary was changed to “Nayuki’s Tea”; the alphabetic signboard was also changed from the Japanese “NAYUKI” to the pinyin “NAIXUE”.

Consumers’ confidence in Chinese culture is rising rapidly. In order to cater to the Z-generation consumer group, fake foreign brands “national fashion” have become the top priority, and Nayuki is also eager to disassociate itself from Japanese elements.

In addition, Nayuki also set off the “raw material inversion” of the new tea drinking track, upgrading the commonly used sugar substitute erythritol in the industry to Luo Han fructose. According to Naixue’s publicity: the sweetness of Luo Han Fructose comes from “Mogroside” and has been debugged for a year. After more than a dozen iterations, it is a natural sugar substitute with zero calories, which is 300 times sweeter than sucrose, and contains Luo Han Guo It has its own fragrance, fuller taste and no astringency.

The new sugar substitute has made the already chaotic new tea drink track more inward. It can be seen that Nayuki, who is the “first new tea drink”, is no longer willing to continue to be the second child for thousands of years.

At the same time, Lele Tea and Naixue have quite similar concepts. In the early days, they both had a double product of milk tea + European bag and a direct-sale store model, and focused on creating a “third space” in the community.

For Naixue, the acquisition of Lele Tea can not only expand its share, consolidate its advantages, but also reduce unnecessary competition. However, the long-term loss of Lele Tea is still a problem that needs to be solved urgently.

For the new tea drinking track, the combination of Naixue and Lele Tea will make the new tea drinking track enter an inherent cycle in which the strong are stronger and the weak are weaker, and the industry will become more and more “rolled”.

This article is reproduced from: https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2022-12-07/doc-imqmmthc7358936.shtml
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