Hello, this is Qianshao Technology Special Training Camp.
Beyond Meat As a star enterprise in the artificial meat industry, its stock price has increased by 5 times in just two months since was listed on in May 2019. But since then, Beyond Meat's stock price has never reached its former high again, and now it is less than one-third of its highest.
After the latest third-quarter financial report was released on November 11 this year, Beyond Meat's stock price plunged nearly 14%. Analysts said that the company's profitability faced challenges, with gross profit margin in the third quarter only 21.6%, lower than market expectations of 29%. We can't help but want to ask, what's wrong with Beyond Meat, who is holding the first halo of artificial meat?
Beyond Meat was established in 2009. Since its establishment, it has been praised and invested by big names such as Bill Gates and . Beyond Meat takes the route of artificial meat, which means extracting the protein from pea and soybeans, and then mixing the proteins together through heating and squeezing. Then adding potato starch auxiliary ingredients to simulate the chewing feeling of real meat. In addition, you can also add some coconut oil to imitate the taste of fatty meat. Anyway, all Beyond Meat wants to do is to make the plants feel like meat.
Beyond Meat's hottest product is called Beyond Burger. This is a plant-based meat filling sandwiched in a burger. Compared with real meat burgers, Beyond Burger can restore the taste very well. Because the broken meat filling itself loses part of the meaty texture, it is much less difficult to imitate. Many people have reported that they cannot eat the difference between plant-based meat burgers and real meat burgers.
Therefore, Beyond Meat successfully reached a cooperation with global fast food chains such as McDonald's , KFC , and entered China last year. The founder of the company Ethan Brown said that China is a big market that must be won. On April 8 this year, the Beyond Meat Plant Meat China Production Factory was officially unveiled on Jiaxing , the company's first factory outside the United States.
China is a major consumer country, and its population base of 1.3 billion has made countless excellent consumer companies. If Beyond Meat can successfully enter the big market in China, why worry about not being able to increase future income and profits.
However, Wang Yuquan When analyzing Beyond Meat in last year's technology training camp, he told everyone that its technology cannot support such a high valuation. If you join the technology training camp, you may not be surprised by the current dismal company stock price.
The following sharing part of Wang Yuquan’s wonderful analysis of Beyond Meat.
1. Beyond Meat and tofu have no essential differences
If you only look at their raw materials, you will find that they are amazingly similar, both are soybean products such as soybeans and peas. Beyond Meat has nothing more than putting some technical skills on the taste. However, China is a big soy product country. It has been studied for a long time and extensively for how to make tofu taste like meat. It is not only meat filling like hamburger meat, but also tofu made with double-cooked pork and braised pork. It has a wide variety and has a great taste.
So from this perspective, Beyond Meat does not actually have any core barriers from raw materials to processing technology. This can be seen from the company's R&D investment in recent years. In 2018, the ratio of R&D expenses to operating income was 10.9%, 6.9% in 2019 and 7.7% in 2020. This is really too low compared to small technology companies that often invest 30%-50%.
Someone asked, Beyond Meat itself is a consumer enterprise for the public, why does it require such a high R&D investment? The answer is actually very simple, so as to value Beyond Meat according to consumer companies, and don’t be compatible with the halo of artificial meat technology companies.
2. The United States and China are two completely different markets
An important reason why the investment institutions in the United States, including Bill Gates, are interested in Beyond Meat because of environmental protection. A large amount of meat consumption brings about a huge animal husbandry industry, and one of the major side effects that follows is the greenhouse gas produced by animals. At present, greenhouse gas emissions generated by the animal husbandry industry have accounted for 14.5% of the global total. Against the backdrop of reducing carbon emissions in all countries, replacing animal husbandry with artificial meat has gradually attracted everyone's attention.
Therefore, Beyond Meat also promotes it from the perspective of environmental protection. For example, on the company's official website, it says: "By moving from animal meat to plant meat, we can have a positive impact on four increasingly serious global problems: human health, climate change, restrictions on natural resources, and animal protection."
It is undeniable that in the United States, this statement by Beyond Meat is feasible, because Americans do attach more importance to environmental protection concepts, and there are a large number of vegetarians who cannot bear to eat animals from the bottom of their hearts. This can be seen from the numerous animal protection associations in the United States.
But in China, we hardly see any discussion on how the animal husbandry climate is. Although it has reached a point that cannot be ignored, everyone does not care much, and there are few hearings about humanistic care for animals. Therefore, based on this fact, it is definitely ineffective to play the environmental protection card in China.
Even from the perspective of cost and quality, since China has a developed soy products industry, the types and levels of imitation meat are very high, and Beyond Meat has no advantages. Therefore, although Beyond Meat claims to occupy the Chinese market, it is actually very difficult.
3. Real artificial meat is not plant meat
There are two technical routes for artificial meat. Beyond Meat takes the simplest plant meat route, but in essence it is not meat. Another route is based on synthetic biology , which is to cultivate muscle stem cells to grow real meat in culture dish . This technical route is very difficult to implement because the structure of meat is actually very complex, including fat, muscle, connective tissue and vascular system, and needs to be organically combined.
But the advantage of growing meat is that it is essentially no different from real meat, and the taste is exactly the same as real meat, so we believe that this technical route is the real future direction of artificial meat. However, many meat cultivation companies are still in the laboratory stage, and mass production and cost are unsolved problems.
We can think that the artificial meat industry has just begun to sprout, and Beyond Meat is just a passerby in this process.
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