19 years’ milestone of entrepreneurship made one of the largest retail giants in the China
19 years’ milestone of entrepreneurship made one of the largest retail giants in the China; however, it is willing to give its all to Jack Ma.
“When times discard you, it will not even say goodbye to you”, remarked by Mingduan Huang, who was once well-known, respected and distinguished as the founder of RT-Mart, but just now announced to resign. Over the past 19 years’ process of leading his men to survival and development, he had never expected he would be defeated by a rival seemingly unconnected with retail industry called Alibaba instead of a giant in the same industry like Wal-Mart or Carrefour.
There had never been any one of his entity stores closed over the past 19 years. He outdid his competitors in this aspect; nevertheless, he was beaten by times.
Mingduan Huang, born in a fishing village of Tainan, Taiwan, was once an idler bored with study prior to high school. Aside from acting as a watchman by standing at the entrance to casino, he once led a crowd to fighting with others. Fortunately, he returned back onto the right track later. Ever since then, everything about him has changed dramatically.
In 1997, he received a designation to set up a large number of RT-Mart department stores in Taiwan and Chinese mainland; 2 years later, the operation revenue achieved by RT-Mart reached 24 billion CNY; a decade later, RT-Mart’s operation revenue exceeded 40 billion CNY, which made it outdoing Carrefour and become not only the biggest department store but also the Number 1 in the Chinese mainland. In 2011, RT-Mart defeated Wal-Mart, merged with Auchan into Sun Art Retail and started its IPO in Hong Kong. In 2016, the operation revenue accomplished by Sun Art Retail broke through 100 billion CNY.
Over the past years, RT-Mart had worked miracles one after another, thereby gaining an honorary title “Top leader in department stores” for not closing a single entity store over the past19 years. Even so, nobody forecast RT-Mart would lose in competing with times especially when RT-Mart achieved triumph over all the rivals it confronted in 2017.
I devoured you though my business appeared unconnected with yours.
At the end of 2017, Alibaba used 24.4 billion HKD, equivalent to 2.88 billion USD, purchased RT-Mart’s parent company Sun Art Retail at a costly investment. A few months shortly after the purchase, Mingduan Huang the board director of Sun Art Retail and founder of RT-Mart announced to resign. Then, Yong Zhang the CEO of Alibaba took over his position. Subsequently, the original high-level managers of RT-Mart left their respective posts in succession, thus, leading a major change in the high-level managers of RT-Mart.
“I devoured you though my business appeared unconnected with yours” sounds like a harrowing expression; however, there is no mercy in the business battle. Times have been developing at a rapid speed; nowadays, the rise of the Internet has put substantial impact on the traditional business mode. As Jack Ma underlined, “In the near future, entity economy cannot separated from the Internet and vice versa; the two are bound to combine into an integral part, existing and disappearing with each other”.
The birth of online shopping changed everyone’s way of shopping; likewise, the mobile payment altered everyone’s method of paying for what they want. RT-Mart, as a traditional giant in the entity store retail, did not overlook the layouts of e-commerce via the Internet but take action at a slightly slow pace. As a consequence, feiniu.com created by Mingduan Huang was scarcely known under the converging attack of Alibaba and Jingdong. After undergoing the defeat, Mingduan Huang finally gave an thorough understanding by saying, “The best endings for RT-Mart for the moment is to be assimilated by the e-commerce tycoon Alibaba.”
19 years’ hard work fell into other’s hands at the end as if the hard worker got nothing.
For Alibaba, it is a key step of developing new retail to purchase Sun Art Retail. As to the successive resign of RT-Mart’s founder and high-level managers is an inevitable phenomenon. On one hand, RT-Mart, as a time-honored and traditional giant in entity retail, formed deep-rooted retail ideas of the outdated from the outside to the inside. After being purchased by the Internet tycoon, it will be thoroughly baptized and reformed in the form of concept. Obviously, the senior managers out of the traditional business mode cannot cope with the reform based on the Internet within a short time; otherwise, RT-Mart did not have to be subject to Alibaba.
On the other, as a saying goes, “Every new sovereign brings his own courtiers”, needless to say Alibaba which is known as its way of purchasing other companies to exchange for a brand new internal structure. Unlike Tencent only investing its target companies without interfering in their business till waiting for year-end dividends, Alibaba asks for injecting its own advanced operating modes into the companies that it purchased in pursuit of clearing the barriers hindering the traditional and the new. This is applied to not merely the companies purchased by Alibaba previously but also to RT-Mart.
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