Meituan Retail Wants to Concentrate on Supermarkets; Bernanke Wins the Award for Explaining “Common Sense”

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Meituan Retail Wants to Concentrate on Supermarkets

On October 11, Meituan selected to update its brand positioning as “Tomorrow’s Supermarket”, and launched the slogan “Really Really Save”. After the update, Meituan has two “supermarkets”, the “Tomorrow Supermarket” composed of Meituan Select and Tuanhaohuo, and the “Instant Supermarket” composed of Meituan Flash Shopping and Meituan Shopping.

In August, Haohuo, an e-commerce business group affiliated to the Daojia business group, was merged into Meituan Select. Tuanhaohuo’s average daily order volume in September was about 300,000 orders, and its goal is to break even by the end of the year. A person from Meituan said that the current direction of Tuanhaohuo is to cooperate with factories to produce its own brand products and replace some of the high-selling products preferred by Meituan, so as to increase the profit margin of the latter.

According to “Waidian Finance”, Meituan Select may replace Tuanhaohuo in the second column at the bottom of the Meituan app homepage.

Tuanhaohuo internally refers to this in-app placement as the “main position”. A person from Meituan said that the retention rate of the main position is much better than other channels (recommendation, search, guess you like, games, etc.); while the main traffic of Meituan Preferred comes from WeChat applet, the meaning of the bottom bar is to clarify a “” Field”, this field is the next-day delivery e-commerce, which is further subdivided by demand, category, and contract performance method.

There are also Meituan people who believe that it was difficult for consumers to associate the name “Meituan Preferred” with daily consumption such as grocery shopping. Now the new positioning further clarifies what it will provide to consumers, and the new slogan further reduces the difficulty for consumers to understand “province”.

Compared with Duoduomaicai, which focuses on low-cost explosives, Meituan has always wanted to be an online supermarket with higher product abundance and better quality. Meituan Select has discussed two product routes: one is to make less and more high-quality explosives, and the other is to make “supermarkets” with more categories (SKUs).

Meituan chose the latter after research and tried to expand the number of SKUs to 3,000. This is close to the level of Costco, a warehouse supermarket, and can cover the daily needs of most users. In the first half of this year, Meituan had more than 1,500 preferred SKUs, while Duoduo had less than 1,000.

This brand update highlights the characteristics of Meituan’s preference for consumers to “save”. This year, in order to reduce commodity prices, Meituan has encouraged more suppliers to uniformly purchase from the origin to reduce procurement costs. Suppliers grade the goods, supplying Meituan with better quality, and supplying other channels with lower quality and cheaper prices. “In this way, Meituan can get products of relatively good quality and lower prices than in the past,” said a Meituan source.

Meituan is also saving money, cutting 10% – 15% of its workforce this year. At the Meituan earnings conference in the first quarter, Wang Xing, the founder and CEO of Meituan, said, “Meituan’s overall growth rate is not as good as expected” and “the investment in new businesses will be more cautious.” In the second quarter, new businesses, including Meituan Select, had reduced losses by 2.3 billion yuan compared with the first quarter.

“Waidian Finance” also learned that since last year, Meituan Select has provided home delivery services for group leaders across the country. The coverage of this service is not high, less than 30%. Most of the self-pickup sites rely on canteens, supermarkets, and restaurants, but the head of the group is not motivated enough to provide additional services for Meituan. Despite this, the coverage of home delivery by Meituan’s preferred group leader is still higher than that of Duoduo. (Ma Kexin and Chen Jing)

Bernanke wins award for articulating ‘common sense’

This year’s three Nobel laureates in economics have had mixed reactions to the award.

Douglas Diamond held a press conference. Philip Dybvig plays guitar in his hotel room. The most controversial, Ben Bernanke, spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he served.

The feedback from the three economists was also wildly different.

media captionI saw Bernanke – “Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to three men, including Ben Bernanke, for their research on the financial crisis” Nanke” “Three Economists, Including Former Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, Win Nobel Prize for Research on Banking Crisis”…

Most of the high praise comments on overseas social platforms say that this year’s award is a joke – basically directed at Bernanke.

“Bernanke won the prize for solving the Fed’s money-printing machine jam?” “Giving Bernanke the Nobel Prize in Economics may be the drunkest decision ever” “Abusing Quantitative Easing Designer who benefits the wealthy wins Nobel Prize” “It’s a bankruptcy moment for central banks and the Nobel Prize in Economics”…

Critics argue that Bernanke still has many questions to answer, such as why he ignored signals of the subprime mortgage crisis during his tenure as a Fed governor from 2002 to 2005, and whether the bailout contributed to today’s high inflation and more complex economic woes.

For capital markets, Bernanke is famous for his tenure as Fed chairman from 2006 to 2014. For economics, he is best known for his research on the causes of the Great Depression in the 1930s in the United States and the Great Recession in Japan in the 1990s.

But this time, Bernanke won for a paper published in 1983 that emphasized the systemic role of banks. He believes it was the self-reinforcing bank run that brought the U.S. economy to its freezing point during the Great Depression, not just the result of a recession.

He shares the same core insight as Dubwick and Diamond’s respective studies: Banks are not neutral intermediaries, but use a variety of methods to absorb savings and decide who to lend to. They modeled that banks are so important to the economy that they are dangerous.

Banks profit from taking deposits at relatively low interest rates and lending at relatively high interest rates. Some of the money goes to real estate, and some of it goes to industry and agriculture, and it is borrowed for several years or decades.

People who borrow money don’t give out so much money to the bank at once, and the bank doesn’t have that much money to pay back to depositors in one go. If everyone goes to the bank to withdraw money together, the bank will fail. Such things have played out in one region after another since the dawn of banking.

Dubwick and Diamond created a framework for people to study other questions about financial crises, such as why people need liquidity in the first place, or how panics started.

Bernanke’s research further explained why financial crises lead to economic collapse, and was the first to express these problems in the language of mathematical models.

His proposed “financial accelerator”. In short, when the economy is good, it is easy for people and banks to borrow money. When the economy is bad, not only is it difficult to borrow new money, but old debts also become more expensive due to the depreciation of collateral, so people can only reduce borrowing, investment and consumption. Economic activity has declined, and asset prices have shrunk further.

A big difference from Gu Chaoming’s balance sheet recession theory is that economists such as Bernanke mainly discuss it from the perspective of lenders. Gu Chaoming considers the destructive power of debt repayment itself. So Bernanke believes that the Fed did not inject enough liquidity into the banking system in time to cause the Great Depression. He even thinks that in extreme cases, money can be thrown directly from the helicopter. Gu Chaoming felt that it was useless to spend money.

Academics are controversial. Compared with literature and philosophy and the history of natural sciences, the history of economics is not too long. The recognized originator of economics, Adam Smith, has only been around for more than 200 years. But as Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith (Noah Smith) said, there is no problem with Bernanke winning, after all, few economists use their research results to save the world economy.

Some have questioned why the Nobel Prize in Economics is usually not awarded for a specific discovery about the economy, but for new research methods. In the words of the Nobel committee, the “fundamental influence” of the laureate provides a consistent mathematical model for what can be called “common sense.” Their main contribution may not have been to discover something new, but to convey something that others in the economics community have so easily forgotten. (Gong Fangyi)

Only Apple users still have consumption enthusiasm

On October 10, the International Data Corporation (IDC) released a tracking report showing that in the third quarter of this year, global PC shipments fell by 15.0% year-on-year to 74.2 million units, and the traditional PC market continued to decline.

The only Apple in the list to achieve growth shipped 10.06 million units, a year-on-year increase of 40.2%, ranking fourth, and its market share increased from 8.2% in the same period last year to 13.5%. The report said that Apple increased supply in the third quarter to make up for orders lost in the second quarter due to the epidemic. The top three Lenovo, HP and Dell all declined by more than 16%.

Since 2020, the epidemic has stimulated some purchase and replacement needs, and the PC industry has ushered in a wave of growth. However, the service life of PC products is generally 3-5 years or even longer, and the previous continuous growth has brought about market saturation. In the second quarter of this year, global PC shipments have fallen by 15.3% year-on-year.

Gartner, another market research firm, also released its third-quarter global PC shipment report on the same day. The report shows that global PC shipments in the third quarter were 68 million units, down 19.5% year-on-year, the largest drop in more than 20 years.

Declining personal computer demand also hit PC chip makers’ results. AMD’s third-quarter revenue was about $5.6 billion, well below its previous guidance, with revenue from the personal user segment down 40% year-over-year. (Intern Zeng Xing)

The first discovery of the Omicron BF.7 variant in Shenzhen

  • On October 10, there were 427 new local confirmed cases and 1,662 asymptomatic infections.
  • Beijing added 13 local confirmed cases and 1 asymptomatic infection.
  • As of 15:00 on the 11th, there were 8 new positive infections, 1 of which was found by social screening.
  • The National Museum announced that it will be temporarily closed from the 11th.
  • Shanghai added 4 local confirmed cases and 24 asymptomatic infections. One of them was found by social screening.
  • Guangdong added 38 local confirmed cases and 25 asymptomatic infections.
  • The BF.7 variant was discovered for the first time in Shenzhen, and those arriving in Shenzhen must carry out “three inspections in three days”.
  • Xinjiang added local “82+375”, of which Urumqi added local “55+222”.
  • Inner Mongolia added local “145+637”, of which Hohhot “113+574”.
  • There are over 3,000 positive cases in Hohhot, and Fangcang No. 1 hospital is under construction.
  • “9+15” was added in Shaanxi, involving 5 cities in the province, among which “4+7” was added in Xi’an.
  • In Xi’an City, offline teaching is suspended for non-junior and high school graduation grades. (Intern Zeng Xing)

OTHER NEWS

Sunscreen brand Jiaoxia updated its Hong Kong stock prospectus.

On October 10, Jiaoxia updated the prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In April this year, Jiaoxia submitted the prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the application has now expired. According to the prospectus, the revenue in the first half of the year was 2.21 billion yuan, an increase of 81.3% year-on-year, and the net profit turned from loss to profit year-on-year. Clothing category is the main source of income for Jiaoxia, which increased by 155.8% year-on-year in the first half of the year.

The Nasdaq fell to a nearly two-year low.

The three major U.S. stock indexes closed down collectively on Monday, with the Dow down 0.32%, the S&P 500 down 0.75%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq down 1.04%, hitting a new low in nearly two years.

More than 270 companies have made buybacks since September.

Recently, a number of A-share companies announced repurchase, of which Tencent spent about HK$350 million to repurchase 1.33 million shares and 1.37 million shares on the 10th and 11th respectively. Xiaomi also repurchased more than 5 million shares for two consecutive days. According to incomplete statistics, since September, more than 70 A-share companies have issued repurchase plans, and more than 270 companies have repurchased.

Players build universes in the game Minecraft.

In the game Minecraft, Christopher Slayton built a universe containing the solar system, Saturn, Earth, black holes and nebulae. He uses modules such as World Edit and Galaxy Texture Pack to construct the universe, and then uses BSL shaders and Optifine tools to optimize the rendering effect. From a distance, it looks like a Milky Way celestial body, but from a close up, it looks like a small square.

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​Singapore’s Hainanese Chicken Rice will not be out of stock.

Malaysia announced that it will lift export restrictions on live chickens in stages from the 12th, allowing the export of 1.8 million live chickens per month. The government will decide whether to fully lift the export ban based on the chicken supply in the local market and the production situation of the farm. The easing of export restrictions is a relief for Singapore, which relies heavily on imports.

Global semiconductor listed companies lost $240 billion in market value in one day.

After the escalation of industry restrictions, the market value of the world’s most important semiconductor companies such as TSMC and Samsung plummeted on Tuesday. Among them, TSMC lost 8.3%, Samsung lost 3.9%, and Nvidia, Qualcomm, ASML and others also lost billions to tens of billions of dollars. market value.

The International Monetary Fund expects the global economy to grow by just 2.7% next year.

The IMF said that the energy crisis in Europe, inflation problems in Europe and the United States, and other problems in other regions have increased the risk of the global economy sliding into recession next year, and lowered its forecast for global economic growth next year to 2.7% from 3.2% this year. %. This is also the lowest value published by the IMF since 2001.

The market value of Moutai once again surpassed that of Tencent.

According to Wind data, after the market closed on October 11, Tencent’s market value was about 2,212 billion yuan, and Maotai’s was about 2,236 billion yuan. This year, Moutai and Tencent’s market capitalization has alternated several times since the end of September. Moutai surpassed Tencent on September 29 and September 30, respectively.

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