why did capital suddenly fall in love with coffee?
In 1615, Toyotomi xiulai committed suicide in Osaka City. Tokugawa Jiakang ended Japan’s more than 100 years of war.
On June 27 of that year, vikhamyi, the Pinghu agent of the East India Company in Japan, shared the new market of this country with Eaton, the manager of the Macao Branch, with a letter.
In the letter, Wickham Yi specially emphasized that he hoped Eaton would find a way to help him buy a can of the best quality tea locally.
It is also known at present that the British are the first to mention Chinese tea.
Professor MacFarlane, a British scholar, later called this leaf from China “green gold”. He has repeatedly stressed that if there were no tea, there would be no British Empire and British industrialization.
During the period when Britain became a sun never setting Empire, tea instead of wine became an important necessity for the British army. They were convinced that drinking tea could ensure the health of soldiers and enhance their combat effectiveness.
With the blessing of tea addiction, the demand for tea in Britain and more European countries is increasing.
In the 29th year of Qianlong’s reign (1764), European countries imported about 1.91 million liang of silver into the Qing Dynasty, while the Qing government exported about 3.64 million liang of silver, of which tea was the largest export.
The huge domestic demand for tea requires the British government to exchange more valuable commodities. The trade deficit is obvious. For this reason, they did not hesitate to engage in illegal activities to deliver opium to China.
Yes, the later Opium War, from the perspective of the British, was probably the “tea war”.
By the early 19th century, opium had become the largest commodity imported by China. In 1839, Lin Zexu, the imperial envoy, concentrated on destroying opium in Humen, Guangdong Province, which triggered the Chinese people’s indomitable resistance to opium.
After that, Britain had to try to grow tea in other places.
From 1849 to 1853, Robert Fortune, the British Royal Horticultural Association, stole Chinese tea twice, and finally planted Darjeeling black tea in the southern foothills of the Himalayas for 20 years. In 1890, British India and Sri Lanka became major tea exporters, and their market share exceeded that of China.
During this period, the East India Company established tea auction markets in Calcutta, Sri Lanka, Colombo and other cities. Until today, the pricing power of tea in the world is controlled by the British.
As addictive consumer goods, tea and opium witnessed the earliest economic globalization.
Professor zhongweimin of Tsinghua University once said:
The factors that trigger globalization are very complex, but there is no denying that the huge growth in the world demand for addictive consumer goods such as tea, opium, sugar, cocoa and coffee has greatly promoted the process of globalization.
This is where global capital aspires.
Georgedagnino, an American financial expert, once said that the economic and financial cycles drive the prices of stocks, bonds, commodities, precious metals, real estate, currencies and other assets. Managing the cycle is a top-down investment logic.
Addictive consumer goods is a long cycle track.
First of all, its demand is stable. Addictive products can attract high viscosity demand and realize stable repurchase; Secondly, it has strong profitability. As an addictive necessity, people care little about its price changes, which often leads to high gross profit.
Such consumer goods often affect one generation or even several generations, and their life cycle is quite long.
In the Chinese market, the biggest addictive consumer goods should be tobacco.
According to the data of 2019, the profit and tax revenue of China’s tobacco industry reached 1.2 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 4.3%, and the total amount paid to the government was 1177billion. Such a tax amount is equivalent to 4 ICBC and 20 Ali.
Of course, the Chinese tobacco company is the leading contributor. However, this is a company owned by the whole people. Under the leadership of the State Tobacco Monopoly Bureau, it conducts centralized and unified management of tobacco products in accordance with the national plan.
This means that the capital is in the tobacco track, and it is not easy to make money at present. Although it is an emerging electronic cigarette product, its global market share by 2023 is less than US $200billion.
However, the second largest addictive consumer goods, alcohol, is a good money maker.
In 1988, China’s market price was liberalized, and the prices of Guizhou Moutai, Wuliangye, Luzhou Laojiao, Shanxi Fenjiu and other brands rose one after another. So that in the following 30 years, the sales above the scale of the Baijiu industry increased rapidly to 600billion.
In 2021, the market value of Moutai in Guizhou reached a maximum of 2.7 trillion, an increase of nearly 300 times compared with that when it was listed in 2001.
It is a pity that wine has not achieved the same achievements as tea in the process of globalization.
In the 16th century, the British took the whisky production process to North America, and produced the later American national wine Bourbon in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
In 1853, the U.S. Navy sailed into the sea of puga, Edo Bay, Japan, and forced Japan to open its door through gunboat threats. As an imported product, American whisky has become a popular foreign product among Japanese young people.
Today, whisky has even surpassed soju and become the category with the largest proportion in the Japanese liquor market.
But in addition to whisky, a series of liquor drinks, such as gin, brandy, vodka, rum, Baijiu, wine and beer, are scattered all over the world. They make people addicted through different tastes, and each of them depends on it.
Unfortunately, wine has not been as successful as tea.
Compared with tea, liquor has several problems:
First, it is impossible to form a category that dominates the global consumer market. Each country and even each region can feed a wine. It has formed the characteristics of stability, high profit and long cycle in the corresponding market with its unique taste.
Second, there is a multi category penetration, and there is a wine generation crisis.
Japanese soju is a living case. 30 years ago, the traditional mainstream liquor in Japan was soju, which boasted in the world as Japan’s inherent distilled liquor.
However, in 2007, after the sales volume of Japanese soju reached its peak, it fell into a continuous decline, and the sales volume decreased by 60% in the past 10 years. Instead, whisky came from Scotland through the United States.
Chinese Baijiu also has similar problems.
Roland Berger previously had data showing that 52% of young people under 30 drank beer, while only 8% drank Baijiu.
In this case, Li Qiang, a liquor expert, believes that the biggest problem is that consumers’ cognitive bias towards Baijiu is mainly reflected in fashion and taste:
First, fashion. In the eyes of young people, Baijiu is unfashionable, vulgar and local. For example, the brand is unfashionable, the drinking method is unfashionable, the drinkers are unfashionable, and the drinking scene is unfashionable, which cannot meet the needs of flaunting individuality and taste.
Second, the problem of taste. The unique technology of Baijiu has created its strong and heavy taste characteristics. Most people drink Baijiu because of some utilitarian needs such as social and business entertainment. Therefore, they are numb to the aesthetic pleasure of Baijiu.
The two problems are superimposed, and the hidden worries of Baijiu dating are highlighted.
In the eyes of capital, investing in low alcohol wine for young people has become a cutting-edge entrance.
Since 2020, new wine brands including jiangxiaobai, Guangliang and berry sweetheart have raised more than 20 times in total. In the first quarter of 2021, on the sales channels of tmall.com and taobao.com, there were 2449 liquor brands with sales growth of 100% or more, including 1415 low alcohol liquor brands, accounting for 57.8%.
However, this industry is not big. Tanghuimin, founder of berry sweetheart, introduced that the scale of low alcohol liquor industry is about 15-20billion, accounting for only 3% of the beer market.
For the liquor market, their biggest competition may not be traditional spirits vs low alcohol liquor, but also other addictive products, such as coffee.
Compared with tobacco and alcohol, coffee may be the only category to take over the popularity of tea in the world.
More than 1000 years ago, African Aborigines were sold to Middle Eastern countries as slaves. Mocha port in Yemen became the largest distribution center and the first stop for slaves to spread coffee beans.
In the early 16th century, Portugal invaded Yemen and brought the new species of coffee to European countries. Due to the popularity of coffee in the domestic market, the Dutch stole coffee trees from Yemen and took them back to Amsterdam for cultivation.
After successful breeding, these tree species quickly copied to their colonies, including Indonesia, Sumatra, Sulawesi, etc. In 1721, the Dutch East India Company exported more than 60000 kilograms of coffee beans from Indonesia to Europe.
For a long time after the tea war, coffee beans became an important raw material in the world trade market, even close to crude oil for a time – this is an industry with a terrible scale.
Coffee in the Chinese market originated in 1902. At that time, a French missionary introduced coffee trees from Vietnam to a village called jukula in Yunnan.
Later, coffee beverage enterprises such as Nestle and Starbucks entered China, and this category began to grow slowly in the domestic market.
According to the data of prospective industry research institute, since 2013, China’s per capita coffee consumption has increased year by year. At that time, coffee chain brands such as man coffee, Costa, zoo and coffee with you rose in the Chinese market, affecting a generation of young people.
By 2019, the domestic per capita coffee consumption will be 7.2 cups. In addition, the average annual growth rate of coffee consumption in China reached 15%, higher than the world growth rate of 2%. It is estimated that by 2025, China’s coffee market will reach 217.1 billion yuan.
What if 2045? This figure may be 10 times that of today.
After all, in the global coffee consumption, Finland has an average of more than 1200 cups per person per year, Switzerland has 800 cups, and the United States and Canada have about 300-400 cups. In Asian countries, Japan and South Korea have 180 cups per capita.
The Chinese market is promising.
However, who are these coffee drinkers?
Talkingdata shows that the users of generation Z after 95 are the main consumers – this group happens to be the group who don’t drink Baijiu.
Drinking and drinking coffee, the post-90s have two purposes: pleasing themselves & socializing.
Alcohol addiction affects a generation over the age of 30. Coffee has just set off a boom in the post-90s student era. It has successfully stuck to a generation with addiction.
It can be speculated that the next Maotai in the Chinese market is likely to appear in the coffee industry – cyclical, stable and profitable, which is driving the influx of capital.
Tencent has invested in generation mathematician coffee, seesaw and M stand, with an estimated value of 4billion. Manner has completed four rounds of financing in six months, and even welcomed Sequoia, Hillhouse, meituan, byte, Ali, Tencent and other large factories
Everyone wondered why capital suddenly fell in love with coffee?
The answer is obvious. This has always been in line with the top-down investment logic: managing the cycle.
Author: huangxiaojun; Source: Shenzhen krypton new consumption (id:xinshangye2016), reprint has been authorized. Reprint authorization and media business cooperation: Amy (wechat: 13701559246);
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