Suning's rural retailer Retail Cloud opened 9,000 stores nationwide to form a new retail layout in county market

NANJING, China, May 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Suning.com (002024.SZ), China's leading smart retail service provider and a Fortune Global 500 company owned by Suning Group, today announced its Retail Cloud (Ling Shou Yun) subsidiary completed 9,000 stores opened nationwide.

The 9,000^th retail cloud store is located in Chongqing, the southwestern metropolitan. Suning plans to open another 600 retail cloud stores to reach a total of 2000 stores in southwestern China.

Officially launched in July 2017, Retail Cloud is an important business sector that aims to help micro and small business merchants thrive in lower-tier cities and county-level markets in China. With the franchise model, Suning Retail Cloud leverages Suning.com's retail capabilities and deep industry know-how, especially in logistics, warehouse, supply chain and technology innovations, to help micro and small merchants in county-level markets easily start a business.

After more than three years of rapid growth, Suning Retail Cloud has now partnered with more than 1,800 brands to better penetrate the lower-tier markets. It serves more than 200 million users both online and offline, and operates more than 10,000 communities. In the meantime, Suning Retail Cloud stores could easily capture the consumer demand in the county and township market, helping brands to better manufacture products based on market demands, thus easy to sell.

Apart from the home appliance and 3C products, Suning Retail Cloud has also tapped into opportunities in the home furnishing market in counties and towns, and duplicated the successful experience from home appliance stores in the home furnishing field. In March 2021, the first retail cloud furniture store opened in Jiangsu Province.

"Home appliances and home furnishing businesses can bring more choices for customers, thus increase the sales while attracting more customers. I believe that is the big advantage of Suning Retail Cloud," said Bi Bo, a retail cloud franchisee who owns the 9,000^th retail cloud store. Bi has accumulated rich experience in store management and staff training in the past 15 years and thus witnessed the ups and downs of traditional home appliance industry. "The single-handed model of doing business no longer works. What we are competing is the comprehensive user experience brought by brand, management, after-sale services including logistics and others," Bi added.

Gu Wei, Senior Vice President of Suning.com, said that in three years of rapid development, Retail Cloud has always worked closely with partners to grow together and achieve win-win. By reorganizing and integrating resources in the upstream and downstream of the entire industry value chain, Retail Cloud has built a modern business circulation system in counties and towns that takes into account both quality and efficiency.

As of the end of 2020, Suning Retail Cloud has opened a total of 8,000 stores, with annual sales exceeding 20 billion yuan. In the first quarter of 2021, Retail Cloud continued to develop with the opening of another 584 stores, and the sales scale increased by 69% year-on-year. On April 12, Retail Cloud announced that it has completed series A financing. CPE China Fund and ADV partners participated in the investment.

SOURCE Suning Group