Produced by | Huxiu Big Business Group
Author | Fang Yu Huxiu Chief Editor
Does a person's retirement take away an era?
Yesterday, Huang Mingduan, the founder of RT-Mart supermarket in mainland China, stepped down as CEO of Gao Xin Retail and officially retired. At this time, he was already 65 years old. Huang Mingduan handed over his career in this life to Lin Xiaohai from Alibaba (starting as CEO of Gao Xin Retail). Considering that the latter is already the CEO of RT-Mart, this may not be a real starting point for Lin Xiaohai, but for the old coach Huang Mingduan, this time is the real end point.
Perhaps some people are still unfamiliar with the name Huang Mingduan, which is the result of his years of low-key sneaking. But you must have heard the saying, "wins all opponents, but loses to an era." The sentence is so widely circulated that it both troubles the author and Huang Mingduan himself.
accompanied by Huang Mingduan's retirement, and the misunderstanding caused by this sentence should come to an end. The reason for this case is as follows: This sentence is not what Huang Mingduan himself said, because an article in " Huashang Taoist " originally intended to pay tribute to Huang Mingduan uses this title "Huang Mingduan, the "King of Land War" who won all the opponents but lost to the people of the times". When reprinting, it was mistakenly believed that it was what Huang Mingduan himself said. Huang Mingduan has always been dissatisfied with this statement. In fact, this article evaluates his status in the world:
Huang Mingduan has also won the reputation of "King of Land Warfare". Even though he has always been behind the scenes, if you don't know Huang Mingduan's reputation and performance in the retail industry, it is a symbol of your very marginality in this industry.
Huang Mingduan's status in the industry needs no further explanation. He started from scratch at the age of 41 and created a retail kingdom of hundreds of billions. In terms of personal influence, Huang Mingduan is essentially a "professional manager", but has created many achievements that "bosses" cannot match in their entire lives. This huge sense of accomplishment and honor is beyond measure by money. As foreign media said, "He is a person who can create the times."
Huang What you are obviously worried about may be the word "lose to the times". In Huang Mingduan's eyes, how could I lose? He once teased in public, "Did you lose to Times? Does Times Supermarket still have it?" This is another story of the world. In the early years, Huang Mingduan brought his Taiwanese team to the mainland to open a RT-Mart supermarket. Some veterans split and ran away, and opened another "Times Supermarket", which has long disappeared. Time is the best referee.
Huang Mingduan's glory is indeed a golden period for supermarkets and hypermarkets. But many people do ignore one thing, that is, when a person cannot dominate a new era, he can still find the most suitable entry point with the attitude of seeking newness and change and the spirit of not admitting defeat. This spirit of constantly breaking through oneself is the driving force for the business society to continue to develop.
Putting aside specific industries, these spirits are the great value of Huang Mingduan's era.
Learn, be learned, and learn again
In the development process of RT-Mart, Huang Mingduan was a learner at first, but later he was a learner. So when a new model appears, can Huang Mingduan and his team, who are over 60 years old, return to the mentality of learners?
This may be what Huang Mingduan admires. He never changes his learning mentality due to his age and status in the world. Huang Mingduan rarely gives public speeches, and the opening remarks when he gave a speech on stage is the same, "I want to report to you today," and what he said mentioned many good practices from competitors. Although he clearly knew that many people in the audience came to learn from RT-Mart.
Even many people who were not of his contemporaries learned from him. Lu Liang, founder of Chayan Yuese, said that his team has learned a lot from RT-Mart's store operations. Although the two industries of tea and supermarkets seem to be irrelevant.
When RT-Mart entered the mainland Chinese market, the two foreign supermarkets, Walmart and Carrefour , had already started to make arrangements, but the RT-Mart team led by Huang Mingduan first learned and then surpassed. Just like the masters in Jin Yong's martial arts novels, they can learn from others' strengths and become their own.So when RT-Mart surpassed Carrefour in 2009, it had changed from the so-called "dark horse" in the Chinese supermarket industry to the first echelon, and many people began to regard RT-Mart as the target of learning.
But the switching speed of the times is getting faster and faster. After 2012, e-commerce shopping began to develop rapidly, and the traditional physical retail industry became increasingly difficult to fight with e-commerce. As an industry leader, RT-Mart also feels this pressure. Like the first reaction of many retail companies at that time, RT-Mart also chose to build its own e-commerce platform to create Feiniu.com . In 2013, Huang Mingduan personally took charge of Feiniu.com. Someone once advised him not to "not protect his integrity in the evening", but he said that personal honor and disgrace are not important, but the important thing is that RT-Mart "can win".
After all, this is a "wolf warrior" that has never lost, and the "Wolf King" is the nickname given to Huang Mingduan by Taiwanese media.
To be honest, Feiniu.com's ultimate fate can only be transformation, which is in line with the big trend of the times. In the original attempt to independently do e-commerce in physical retail, perhaps except for Suning Yigou, it was almost wiped out.
In this sense, Huang Mingduan took charge of the asymmetric war that was difficult to win from the beginning. But did he lose? No, he entered a world of new business logic through his personal struggle with e-commerce. This kind of experience is not unfamiliar with Huang Mingduan. Before he was 41 years old, he was involved in the textile manufacturing industry and was also a layman in the retail industry.
comes from Visual China
never admits defeat, but it does not mean that Huang Mingduan will be "first to the end" with the trend of the times. His growth experience and personality are also destined to have the side of "old naughty boy". When Chinese Entrepreneur magazine interviewed Huang Mingduan in 2014, the most hilarious passage was that Huang Mingduan said that he hoped that Liu Qiangdong and Jack Ma would scold him, so that Feiniu.com would have traffic. at that time he noticed that for new e-commerce platforms, the cost of drainage far exceeds expectations and is also a hole that is difficult to fill in the profits of physical stores.
Of course, he knew very well that no one dared to really "curse him". Liu Qiangdong is not only a junior in age, but also respects Huang Mingduan, and has also led a team to study at RT-Mart. In the Internet world, Liu Qiangdong's reputation later far exceeded that of Huang Mingduan, but this did not affect Huang's status in the martial arts world. As for Jack Ma, everyone later knew that at the end of 2017, Alibaba Baba acquired Gao Xin Retail (RT-Mart parent company, including Auchan) for HK$22.4 billion.
But for Huang Mingduan, it doesn’t matter whether it is gain or loss. This is a new learning journey, although he cannot completely dominate a new era.
We cannot fully understand how much Huang Mingduan learned in this war. But at least under his command, RT-Mart later took many targeted measures to turn the online and offline relationship that was originally in line with water and fire into a competitive and cooperative relationship. According to the China Chain Business Association, Huang Mingduan proposed that hypermarkets should be reconstructed from three aspects: category, function and mind. One of the main lines is that if e-commerce has advantages, try to leave it to partners to do it, while RT-Mart's positioning is an expert in making fresh food.
Huang Mingduan said that among the five major categories of home appliances, textiles, daily necessities, fresh food, fast-moving consumer goods in hypermarkets, the most impacted by e-commerce in recent years are home appliances and clothing. For example, Gao Xin Retail's same-store sales fell by about 1% in 2017, and the decline was mainly home appliances and clothing. Therefore, Gao Xin decided to hand over the home appliance category to Suning for cooperation. Let professionals do professional things. Department stores are taking the cost-effective private brand route.
"As a hypermarket, we should spend more time on fresh food, and we hope to become an expert in the field of fresh food."
On the other hand, with the help of Alibaba's power, RT-Mart's stores are also actively embracing the Internet, providing home-to-home services, and carrying out digital transformation.
can be imagined. If he is also in Huang Mingduan's situation, is there anyone who can handle it better than him? He maintained RT-Mart's status as a world leader and allowed RT-Mart to integrate with the times.
He makes everyone, and in the end, the winner is the winner.
Career is life
Huang Mingduan could have retired a few years earlier, and it was Feiniu.com and his later cooperation with Alibaba that delayed his retirement plan. However, those who are familiar with him also know that Huang Mingduan himself is a workaholic and is one of the few professional managers. He does not seek fame or profit, and seems to be only interested in the work itself.
The industry calls Huang Mingduan "Director Huang". With Mr. Huang's value, he certainly does not lack money. However, even in the era when cash payment was the mainstream, it is said that Huang Mingduan once brought a few hundred-dollar bills and went on a business trip with a suitcase, without a follower or assistant. He likes private visits on WeChat and believes that the password of the retail industry is in the scene, the store, and the mouths of consumers. Because he is too low-key, many employees of RT-Mart do not recognize him. Wan Deqian, editor-in-chief of Future Consumer APP, mentioned one thing. Once when Huang Mingduan was inspecting the store, he found that a store was incorrectly displayed and directly adjusted it. As a result, the clerk who didn't know him even had a conflict with him. As the chairman, Huang Mingduan can also guide the terminal business to the end, which is also something that people below are afraid of.
Huang Mingduan is naturally a strong "tyrant" in internal management. Because he doesn't have much concept or obsession with money, when he loses his temper, water cups worth dozens of yuan and expensive watches are the same treatment, and they may fly out of his office and become his punching bag.
Huang Mingduan's personality is naturally related to his growth environment. He was born in a poor family and knew the taste of poverty. However, after he achieved success in his career, he did not squander his wealth more and more, but still spent a lot of his time and energy on his career. Regarding his existing wealth, he would choose to do charity and support those poor students like him. He once said to his subordinates, "Don't look down on migrant workers, migrant workers will become chairman one day."
Huang Mingduan, who believes that hard work can change his destiny, has no authority and destiny in his eyes, and can only continue to learn, advance, and learn again on the right path. Huang Mingduan was also rebellious in youth and did not like to study. From an ignorant boy who kept the door to a casino in his early years to a college student later, his transformation was astonishing. After he worked, he followed Yin Yanliang as the back-end of Runtai Group, and was a partner and a loyal subordinate. He has achieved his own limit in every role he needs to play in his life, and never deviates from the established track. He runs his own business and his unique life, and the two have long been combined into one. In the battle with fate, he is undoubtedly always the winner.
More importantly, if we regard RT-Mart as a person, he is still trying to input this gene to RT-Mart. Of course, the genes, transformation and growth of an organization are far more complex and difficult to predict than a person. But at least until now, Huang Mingduan's shadow on RT-Mart can still be seen everywhere. The learning ability, organizational ability and resource mobilization ability he strives to build is also a valuable asset for RT-Mart to face the future.
In 2017, when Alibaba acquired Gao Xin Retail, Huang Mingduan's stay and leave at that time attracted attention. The twists and turns can be seen from the personnel arrangements later. Huxiu wrote: In March 2018, Alibaba CEO 3 Zhang Yong replaced Zheng Quantai as Gao Xin's non-executive director and chairman; Zhang Yong took over as RT-Mart chairman, founder Huang Mingduan resigned but chose to remain a member of the Board of Directors Investment Committee, Operations Committee and Disclosure Committee, and still provided opinions to the board of directors for Gao Xin Retail's investment activities and operations.
At the end of 2018, Huang Mingduan re-appointed as chairman of Gao Xin Retail, and later served as CEO of Gao Xin Retail and Chairman of RT-Mart; until June this year, Lin Xiaohai, vice president of Alibaba Group and general manager of the retail communications division, served as CEO of RT-Mart, and began a new round of handover transition. It can be said that Alibaba has been struggling with whether RT-Mart needs Huang Mingduan to "help him get on the horse and give him another trip." From the perspective of corporate governance, it can also be understood.
But from Huang Mingduan's mouth, what you hear is always, "Ali is the best choice." He was not entangled, this is not hypocrisy. Huang Mingduan, who has experienced strong storms, has long let go of these obsessions of success or failure.People with obsessions are all spectators around them.
Huang Mingduan really regarded RT-Mart as his career in his life. According to the Future Consumer APP, it is said that at the handover ceremony, Huang Mingduan sang a song "Persistence", which reads: "The road to success is not crowded, because there are too few people who persist. Poor children must use their lives to fight for life." When they sang in the mood, Huang Mingduan burst into tears. This should be very rare, the wolf king cried.
But he has tried hard to bring RT-Mart to today's height, and there is actually no regret. Just like the article that caused misunderstandings before said in the end of the article:
started from scratch since leaving Taiwan in 1997 and went to mainland China to start from scratch. It has been 20 years since the "Wolf Warriors" who followed him to mainland China to work hard, most of the "Wolf Warriors" who have followed him to work hard have turned white.
With the deep integration of Alibaba and RT-Mart, they may soon return home. Compared with the goals given by Yin Yanliang when they went to war 20 years ago, it was an absolute triumph.
Although the king retires, the legend of the world never grows old.
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