Suning's rural retailer Retail Cloud (Ling Shou Yun) Completes Series A Financing

NANJING, China, April 13, 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 subsidiary completed series A financing. CPE China Fund and ADV partners participated in the investment.

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. As of the end of 2020, Suning Retail Cloud has opened a total of 8,000 stores, with annual sales exceeding 20 billion yuan.

Zhang Yinghao, the Managing Director of CPE, said, "The lower-tier cities have broad market space and potentials. Suning Retail Cloud has effectively solved the daily operation difficulties of the supply chain, SaaS, logistics and others for small, medium and micro businesses in the lower-tier market, and realized the empowerment of the entire value chain. More importantly, the excellent team ability of Retail Cloud ensures that it can achieve cross-track replication and rapid expansion in the future. "

Suning Retail Cloud has helped more than 1,800 brands penetrate the lower-tier market, covering tens of thousands of towns and villages in 31 provincial units across the country. It serves more than 200 million users both online and offline, and operates more than 10,000 communities. Retail Cloud is becoming a huge private traffic aggregation platform in the lower-tier market. According to Suning.com's 2020 performance preview, there were 3,201 retail cloud franchise stores opened in 2020. In the first quarter of 2021, there were 600 retail cloud stores opened, and in which 120 stores opened on a single day in March.

With the rapid growth and expansion of the business, Suning Retail Cloud has tapped into opportunities in the home furnishing market in counties and towns, and "duplicated" the successful experience accumulated in-home appliance stores for a long time in the home furnishing field. In March 2021, the first retail cloud furniture store opened in Jiangsu Province.

Suning.com sets its goal of 12,000 retail cloud stores opened by the end of 2021. With the completion of series A financing, Suning Retail Cloud will effectively consolidate its position in the lower-tier markets and lead the O2O full-scenario retail transformation in counties and towns.

According to industry analysts, the continued strengthening of the retail cloud in the lower-tier market will further accelerate Suning.com's retail-focused business development strategy and enables the company to share and empower its retail capabilities in the industry. At the same time, it also confirms that Suning.com is gradually transforming its positioning as a retail service provider.

SOURCE Suning.com