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Live streaming of self-evidence has become a sharp weapon to regain trust.

Whenever there is a crisis of trust in the industry, there are always brands that do their best in the live broadcast room, focusing on sincerity.

After the oil tanker incident broke out, the anchor of Luhua staged an "oil drinking show" in the live broadcast room, which not only became a hot search but also sold hundreds of thousands of copies at the center of the storm.

When the starch sausage reputation collapsed, a host spoke up for the regular starch sausage manufacturers and ate 10 starch sausages in 2 hours, which directly reversed the public opinion on the entire network.

Another brave person was Gaga Soy Sauce. When technology and hard work were at their peak, he invited Xin Jifei to drink a bottle of soy sauce in the live broadcast room, which attracted many people to place orders enthusiastically.

The live broadcast room has proven itself to be the "savior of trust", but it is not a panacea, especially for Gaga Soy Sauce.

Recently, Jia Jia Soy Sauce’s “buff of distrust” is almost fully stacked.

The MSG OEM factory, which was the profit maker of Gaga Group, was shut down due to environmental issues.

The group’s market value evaporated by 8 billion yuan, and its stocks faced a “ST delisting warning” for the second time.

Even the boss's family of three were included in the list of dishonest persons, and the cumulative amount of money executed reached 1.394 billion yuan.

The once No. 1 soy sauce stock in China has been in a worse and worse situation. Apart from the force majeure of market competition, it is more because of the "pride" of its founder.

The Chinese teacher who is afraid of poverty,

Building a Billion-Dollar Empire

When talking about the original intention of starting a business, Tao Huabi of Lao Gan Ma said: If I am not bold, I will have no food to eat.

This sentence is also very appropriate when applied to Yang Zhen, the founder of Gaga Soy Sauce.

Yang Zhen, who was born in Ningxiang, Hunan, lost his father at the age of 7. Because his family was poor, his two sisters got married early and his two brothers dropped out of school to work to supplement the family income.

As the youngest child in a poor family of five, every decision Yang Zhen made in his life was often related to making money.

After graduating from university, Yang Zhen successfully became a teacher and had a stable income of 100 yuan per month to supplement his family income.

Because the family was too poor, his two elder brothers had not been able to marry for a long time, and his elderly mother had to work in the fields, so Yang Zhen decided to start his own business.

Working man Yang Zhen started to become the "soy sauce king" with a bottle cap.

He accidentally discovered that traditional soy sauce bottle caps were easily dirty, so he invented a pull-ring bottle cap. Not only did it prevent the soy sauce from spilling when poured, it also improved the factory's filling efficiency.

Yang Zhen originally wanted to sell this disruptive patent to soy sauce factories, but the sky-high price of 500,000 yuan caused many factories to drive him out.

So, Yang Zhen, who had repeatedly hit a wall, started two "big gambles".

It was his first big gamble. He dared to open a factory with only 3 acres of land and took on the local tyrant.

In 1995, Yang Zhen registered the Gaga Soy Sauce Company in Hong Kong. It sounded high-end, but in fact it was just a 3-acre factory located in the urban-rural fringe and dozens of rural workers.

At that time, the supermarket shelves in Hunan had been occupied by three local soy sauce factories: Furong, Fenghuang and Longpai for many years.

In order to successfully open up sales channels, Yang Zhen published several suspense advertisements in newspapers titled “Wheat+Soybeans=?” before officially recruiting investors.

After whetting everyone's appetite, Gaga"Wheat + soybean, solid ingredients from experienced farmers" + "one bottle as two bottles" + "clean bottle cap"He used three axes to break out of the encirclement.

With just a bottle cap, Yang Zhen earned 13.68 million yuan a year in Hunan. You should know that the housing prices in first-tier cities were only a few hundred yuan per square meter at that time.

The second gamble was to become the aristocrat among soy sauces, competing with Moutai and Coca-Cola.

At that time, Shuangfeng Soy Sauce had a market share of 70% in Changsha, and the ex-factory price of each bottle was only 14.8 yuan, but Jiajia dared to sell it for 54 yuan, which was indeed aristocratic in terms of price.

Where does a small local brand get the confidence from?

In 2003, Yang Zhen spent 48 million yuan to win the highest bid for an advertisement that year:CCTV News Broadcast every hour.

At that time, 48 million was equivalent to the total profit of Gaga Soy Sauce for seven years, which directly emptied the family's assets. Fortunately, Yang Zhen was an expert in manipulating public sentiment.

After appearing on CCTV, Yang Zhen used the slogan "A soy sauce bottle cap, breaking a century of history", which triggered a packaging revolution in the entire industry. After that, almost all soy sauces were designed with pull rings, which have been used to this day.

This wave of publicity made Gaga Soy Sauce popular across the country.

After two consecutive months of advertising, Gaga Soy Sauce’s annual revenue reached 500 million yuan, and its market share once surpassed Lee Kum Kee, second only to Haitian and Delicious Fresh.

When the market was expanded to Guangdong, Yang Zhen openly stated: "No one, a soy sauce company from the mainland, has ever been able to gain a foothold in Guangdong like me."

Because Foshan, Guangdong is the Jerusalem of the soy sauce industry, to conquer the Guangdong market is to occupy the national high ground.

In 2012, Yang Zhen took Gaga to the stock market, making it “China’s No. 1 soy sauce stock.”

Yang Zhen also achieved his goal of making his family rich, and was listed on the Hurun Rich List with a net worth of 2 billion, becoming the soy sauce king.

The slash boss who didn't do his job properly lost 8 billion in gambling

Yang Zhen, who lives a hard life, has always had two obsessions: taking good care of his family and making more money.

However, these two life creeds led Yang Zhen and Gaga Group to take a long detour.

Yang Zhen, who regards taking care of his family as his life creed, has a simple and crude method, which is to arrange all his family members to work in his company.

His son became deputy general manager at the age of 19, his wife is a director, his cousin was the chairman, and the current chairman, Gaga, is also Yang Zhen's nephew-in-law.

What did Yang Zhen do after handing over the company to his family? Of course, he went to make more money.

In the first ten years after he started his business, Yang Zhen did whatever he could to make money: he tried special pig farming, food processing, and even sold the invisible screens he invented, which had nothing to do with soy sauce.

The past ten years of business experience and the two successful gambles on raising the price of soy sauce made Yang Zhen very confident in his investment vision, so he decisively became a slash boss.

Yang Zhen's initial decision to engage in investment business was also a helpless one.

After the company went public, he lent 400 million yuan to several upstream companies with whom he had cooperated for many years. When they were unable to repay the loan, he used their assets to pay off the debts.

In order to revitalize these assets, Yang Zhen had to keep increasing his investment. Unfortunately, after multiple rounds of guaranteed financing, most of them still could not escape bankruptcy, leaving Yang Zhen with only more debts.

These failures may have hurt Yang Zhen's pride, but also inspired him to become the Buffett of the soy sauce circle and to be determined to copy a Gaga in the investment circle.

1. Casting a wide net and catching fish blindly, "unfinished building" type investment

In 2015, e-commerce was booming. Chen Guanghui, who had failed in nine business ventures, founded Yunchu E-commerce. Yang Zhen was impressed by the concept of "last-mile delivery of high-frequency products with urgent needs" and the ambition of Hunan's local e-commerce.

Yang Zhen directly took out 50 million to buy 51% of the shares, which was called "China's largest angel round of financing" at the time.

Unfortunately, despite his great reputation, the result was tragic.

Two years later, Yang Zhen returned 51% of the shares to Chen Guanghui for free at a price of RMB 0.

Although 50 million yuan was wasted, Yang Zhen became more and more courageous. Later, on the grounds of expanding the production line, he planned to acquire 100% of the shares of La Meizi Food, and also invested in companies such as Gu Dasao and Paizai Food.

It’s a pity that these investments all ended in failure. Not only did they fail to make money for Gaga, they also brought about a huge crisis of trust.

2. Not doing your job and wasting money, using Gaga as an ATM

If the previous investments in e-commerce and food companies were still related to Gaga's main business, then the "Tuna Fishing" that Yang Zhen insisted on acquiring in 2018 was purely "unrelated to his main business."

The main business of Dalian's offshore tuna fishing is going out to sea to catch tuna, which has nothing to do with Jia Jia Soy Sauce.

The most outrageous thing is that this company offered a sky-high valuation of 4.7 billion yuan, while the net assets on Gaga Food’s books were only 2.059 billion yuan.

Acquiring an unrelated company at a 2-fold premium was another big gamble by Yang Zhen.

The promise made by Tuna Fishing is quite tempting: the cumulative net profit in three years will not be less than 1.2 billion yuan.

Yang Zhen, who was determined to make a lot of money, did not wait for the goddess of luck this time. Instead, he waited for Gaga Food to be officially labeled as "ST Gaga".

According to Tianyancha, from April 2019 to October 2023, Yang Zhen became the person subject to execution 42 times, and the total amount of execution reached 4.638 billion yuan.

Yang Zhen's idleness not only turned his family of three into "deadbeats", but also turned Gaga from Yang Zhen's pride into a "cash machine".

From the light of private enterprises to "deadbeats", greed is the original sin

Regarding Yang Zhen’s defeat, some media commented: The money earned by luck will eventually be lost through strength.

In fact, Yang Zhen’s success in founding Gaga was not based on luck, but also on his deep insight into the product and the market.

Before the concept of blockbuster products came into being, Yang Zhen“It is better to sell one unique product than to sell 100 products without any unique features”Written into the corporate values.

At the 1997 Annual Dealer Conference, Yang Zhen excitedly expressed his original intention:I have been making soy sauce for my whole life, only making high-end soy sauce and building the number one soy sauce brand in China.

It can be seen that at the beginning, he still wanted to become a down-to-earth industrialist.

It was just his greed for making money that made him forget his original intention.

In 2015, Gaga Food’s revenue reached 1.657 billion yuan, with a net profit of 176 million yuan, making it the leader in the seasoning industry. Yang Zhen’s family assets also reached their peak, reaching 3.7 billion yuan.

At that time, Haitian Flavor Industry was just preparing to go public, while Qianhe Flavor Industry was still just a local enterprise.

Although he had a good hand, Yang Zhen was obsessed with investment and ignored a trump card that could make him bigger and stronger.Dealer Channel。

Although Gaga was once the king of soy sauce, many people have not heard of this brand now.

Brother Dao visited several supermarkets in Beijing and found that Gaga Soy Sauce had a very weak presence. It was either placed on the last shelf of the shelf, or there were only two bottles hidden among a bunch of soy sauce brands.

Someone also shared in Gaga's brand forum that if you buy Gaga's soy sauce, the salesperson will suggest you choose something else.

The reason behind the weak market presence is Gaga’s neglect of dealer channels over the years.

It can be seen from Gaga's financial report that the number of Gaga's dealers in 2023 was only 1,526, only one more than in 2021, and its main coverage area is still Central China and South China.

In comparison, Haitian Flavor Industry had more than 2,100 distributors when it went public, and had 6,506 as of the first quarter of this year, with 100% coverage of China's prefecture-level cities and above.

Qianhe Flavor Industry had only 354 distributors in 2015, but by 2023 the number of distributors had reached 3,606, with an increase of more than 1,000 last year alone.

The number of distributors of Zhongju High-Tech was 864 in 2018, and it reached 2,084 in 2023.

Although the number of dealers of these companies varies, they are all on an upward trend.

Moreover, the popular products of Jiajia Soy Sauce had to abandon offline sales and switch to online sales because the distribution channels were too expensive. On the other hand, Haitian was very willing to spend money on distribution channels. Not only did it settle the payment regularly on a monthly basis, but it also frequently gave out BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Apple mobile phones as rewards.

As the market share of Gaga Soy Sauce became smaller and smaller and it had no place in many supermarkets, Yang Zhen gradually realized that he had to pull back from the brink.

Yang Zhen publicly reflected: "The slow development of the company after its listing is mainly due to my personal investment since 2013, and then it became a vicious cycle. I kept investing and didn't focus on the main business, so I missed the opportunity for development. I have no choice but to take responsibility for this."

Unfortunately, these debts have already become the snowflakes that crushed him. No matter how glorious a king is, he can only play a supporting role in today's market.

Conclusion:

In fact, Yang Zhen is really good at making popular products, doing marketing, and setting strategies.

From the initial "one bottle, two uses" and "fresh noodles" to the later "reduced salt soy sauce", they have all been at the forefront of market trends. It's a pity that the soy sauce market segment has been expanded and strengthened by Haitian.

The "high-end soy sauce" that Yang Zhen has always been focusing on has also been developing rapidly.

Relevant data shows that in 2015, the market size of high-end and ultra-high-end soy sauce in my country was 10.78 billion yuan, accounting for 18.5% of the soy sauce market. By 2020, the market size of high-end and ultra-high-end soy sauce has reached 25 billion yuan, accounting for 29.5%.

During this period, up-and-coming companies such as Ajisen were making great efforts, but Yang Zhen missed the opportunity because he was expanding his territory in the investment market.

Yang Zhen has emphasized the spirit of hard work countless times in internal meetings, and the walls of his production workshop are engraved with the culture of "addition" and "subtraction".

The “+” and “-” form the Chinese character “干” (work), which means “everyone is a doer”.

However, Yang Zhen's main investment in the later period was not on products, but more on moving around in the capital market.

When an entrepreneur regards money as faith, it is easy for him to succumb to inflated desires.

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