Lining CEO: Management Turnover Has Not Had An Impact On Lining.

Three managers left one after another, bringing some "pains" to the changing Lining. Lining The cost of management reform. Facing the local brand and catching up with the international rapidly brand Containment market In the face of various conjectures, Zhang Zhiyong, chief executive of Li Ning Co, interviewed journalists and explained Lining's strategic transformation.

　 The position of three high pipes has been filled.

News of the departure of three executives on Monday led to a heavy setback in Li Ning Co's share price. The company announced yesterday that it urgently clarified that three managers, including chief operating officer, chief marketing officer and director of e-commerce department, were leaving on the basis of personal development needs. At present, these positions have been taken over by internal staff and do not affect the company's operational matters.

The three Li Ning Co managers were Guo Jianxin, chief operating officer, chief market official Shiwei and director of e-commerce.

Guo Jianxin, 42 years old, former vice president and chief operating officer of Li Ning Co, joined Li Ning Co in 1997. He is mainly responsible for the overall operation system, manages Lining brand and operation system, and has more than 8 years of experience in logistics and purchasing management.

Fang Shiwei, 48, formerly vice president and chief marketing officer of Li Ning Co and general manager of Lining brand market system, is mainly responsible for Lining's brand marketing and communication, public relations, sports marketing, event marketing, digital marketing and so on.

Lin Cai, director of e-commerce Department of Li Ning Co, hosted the Lining official online shopping mall, which was co operated with IBM.

Lining said that the personnel changes will not constitute a substantive blow to the existing strategy and operation of the company, and the company will continue to focus on reshaping brand and channel integration.

Zhang Zhiyong told reporters today that the current chief operating official responsibility will be temporarily responsible to himself. He will also work with the general manager of the brand strategy department, Chen Jijun, to deal with the work of the chief marketing officer, and upgrade Lin's deputy to director of the Department of e-commerce.

Zhang Zhiyong did not think the incident was a "shock" to Li Ning Co. Zhang Zhiyong said that within the Li Ning Co, whether it is department managers or middle-level cadres at the director level or higher level managers, the turnover of personnel is not large from the proportion of personnel.

"The two executives and a middle-level manager who left the office had communicated with their supervisors in accordance with the procedures before leaving, especially Guo Jianxin and Fang Shiwei, who reported directly to me." Zhang Zhiyong said, "they have completed the handover of the work a week before leaving office." He said the resignation will not change the Li Ning Co's established development strategy.

　 Brand remolding

At the end of June last year, marking the opening of the new logo, Lining carried out a series of "brand remolding". He put forward the concept of "post-90s Lining" and organized remolding, and made systematic upgrading of sports category planning, business area division, product development and design. In the transformation of sales organization, the original sales organization was controlled by headquarters and became three independent regional centers, that is, the north, the East and the south.

Earlier comments said that the three managers of Lining left almost at the same time, resulting from the Li Ning Co's internal management changes that led to the weakening of Guo Jianxin's rights and others. There were also comments that the resignation of the three was to pay for its brand rebuilding failure.

In response to the above speculation, Zhang Zhiyong responded to reporters that Li Ning Co is undergoing changes in management, if the organization does not adjust is abnormal. "It is normal to adjust the original authorization."

In response to some doubts about the reshaping of some brands, Zhang Zhiyong said that the establishment of a brand is not achieved overnight, and the establishment of any brand takes time. The next 20 years in China will be the period of maturity of Chinese brands. Lining is very important at this time to position himself in order to accumulate better brand assets so as to establish contacts with consumers. Therefore, Lining chose to take the opportunity to take the initiative to carry out brand promotion under the background of the development of such a market and industry. Brand remolding is not a forced action driven by the market, but a forward-looking strategic choice. Only by conducting strategic transformation and turning more from the price market to the value market can Lining achieve the ultimate long-term stable development.

Zhang Zhiyong introduced that the company has two key points in the five year plan from 2009 to 2013. Besides rebuilding the brand personality, it needs to return to the essence of sports.

He said, the most important thing for sports brand is to go back to sports brand. If sports category is not done and sports life is done, the competition model will become a competition with leisure brand, and there will be a deviation in strategy. "So we feel that when the market changes, the first thing is to return to the essence of sports." It is for this reason that Li Ning Co has long sponsored five gold medal dream teams such as the national badminton team, and has carried out brand cooperation with more than ten provincial track and field teams nationwide.

　　 Will continue to invest in brands.

Li Ning Co said in its 2010 annual report that "the era of high growth of sporting goods has ended." Chief executive Zhang Zhiyong also said that the situation is not optimistic, and acknowledged that sales growth in the short term will also be faced with pressure, because "change takes 2-3 years."

But the market pressure on the "change" is not "buying", from 12 last year, the two quarter of 2011 orders will start, nearly 2 weeks Lining H shares have been substantially reduced. Among them, JP Morgan held a total reduction of 33 million 356 thousand shares, while the US Capital Group Companies reduced 651 thousand shares, and the institutional frenzied cash flow of nearly HK $600 million.

In this regard, Zhang Zhiyong told reporters that "Lining's shareholder structure has been the most stable these years, and the majority of long-term investors." "We are willing to invest in brands, and once China becomes a mature market, we can continue to make profits. So we will continue to invest in brands. Zhang Zhiyong said.

　 High profit margins are not good at the beginning of industrial development.

Reporter: you mentioned that functional products are the focus of Lining's future. Please compare the contribution of sports products and leisure products to the company's profit margin.

Zhang Zhiyong: function and sport and leisure are a classification. In addition, it can also be divided into clothing and shoes, and shoes products are more biased towards functionality. If these two categories are put together, relatively speaking, casual products, clothing sales are more, gross profit than sports shoes, functional products. But from the perspective of the overall value chain, the contribution of shoes is even more. The rule of clothing products is that although there are discounts and promotions, once they do not like them, they will not buy them, and footwear products will be sold at a slight discount because of their high use value. Therefore, relatively speaking, the contribution of shoes will be even higher.

Reporter: when the Li Ning Co set up 20th anniversary last year, it made a post-90s position and made some adjustments to LOGO. Now, do these two changes succeed?

Zhang Zhiyong: it takes time for any brand to be built. "After 90" itself is an idea, not a brand positioning. These are two different concepts. As a brand, it rarely uses age division to locate.

The second, first brand back to the concept of a mass is actually a public product. For example, we do six sports categories, covering a very wide age group, not positioning in the concept of "post-90s". This idea is taken into account when 1990 is the year when Lining founded. We hope that although it is a brand of 20 years, we should point out that Li Ning Co is still young in mentality and still has creative performance.

Reporter: please introduce the adjustment strategy of the company's channel, and how to deal with other domestic sports brands such as Anta. How can Lining guarantee that he will seize the opportunity or ensure that the efficiency is better than other brands?

Zhang Zhiyong: the channel adjustment methods of different brands are different. From a large perspective, some enterprises use multi brand retailers to infiltrate, others use exclusive distribution. The key to our success is to control the product flow in our own hands.

The next step of the company's adjustment is to directly infiltrate with the distributors. After selecting the better distributors in the region and setting up three large areas, the next step is to set up the urban manager system, so that the sales of the company will be more close to the retail store for management and the management of our product transfer process.

This is our very big reform. The challenge of managing this product stream is that we need to further segment the market, and we need to execute our salesmen to every city, every shop.

Reporter: Li Ning Co earned 9 billion 479 million yuan in 2010, and the growth rate of 13% was lower than the compound annual growth rate of more than 30% over the past 10 years. The local brand Anta's 2010 fiscal year turnover reached 7 billion 410 million yuan, an increase of 26.1% over the same period last year. In terms of the number of sales outlets, Anta and Lining are relatively close, and the gap between the overall strength and the Li Ning Co is also narrowing.

From the perspective of financial data, the gap between Jinjiang's brand and Lining is getting closer and closer, and some indicators may be overturned. You said before that it's a short-term phenomenon in the transformation process. How can investors make sure that this is a short-term phenomenon instead of being threatened by other brands?

Zhang Zhiyong: To evaluate a brand should be multi-dimensional, and finance is one aspect. Besides, we should also consider the value of the brand, for example, the brand value includes how much sports resources he has. We do brand research every year to see how many different and valuable customer groups it has. {page_break}

From another point of view, the different stages of development of the industry will also determine the investment period and output period of each brand. If the industry is in the period of investment, from a long-term perspective, a high profit margin is not a good thing, which may affect long-term investment.

From the consumers' point of view, any brand is sold to consumers, but let's look at the most basic value to consumers. The first Chinese brand is better than the international brand in terms of professional product provision. As a sports brand, a very important value is whether you can provide some professional products that can be used by athletes. I don't think so.

The second key is whether we have reached the level of international brands in terms of personality and positioning of our own brands. This is very strange. It seems to be the two most important value of a brand. How can Chinese brands be inferior to international brands, but how much more money is made than people? Actually, the root cause lies in two. First, the stage of China's sporting goods industry is not coming. That is to say, the stage of fierce competition and maturity of products has not yet arrived at the stage where Chinese consumers really need sports products from the demand side.

China's past ten years or ten years of industrial development, and even now, the cost structure, including labor cost structure is relatively low, but at the same time, China's population base is very large, so the scale quickly rose. With a relatively low cost plus scale advantage and a distribution advantage with international brands, the three abilities put together will earn him better income.

But a few key issues that really make a brand, the first is the ability to distribute. As long as commercial real estate penetrates, the advantage of distribution is gone. The second is the cost structure. China's cost structure is continuing upward. When the storefront cost, manpower cost and processing cost go up, this advantage also does not exist. Third is consumer demand, consumer demand is escalated. When we want to use professional products, or when brands match their market segments, there is no advantage for Chinese products that are not located at this time.

Therefore, at this stage, we must realize the competitiveness of the future as early as possible. That's one reason why we want to make brand positioning. Why is it necessary to return to sports? That's why these two brands win in the end.