SHENZHEN’S homegrown retailers have been actively adjusting their growth strategies to adapt to changing consumption patterns as consumers have dramatically altered their shopping habits amid the e-commerce boom as well as in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, winshang.com reported yesterday.

Shirble Department Store Holdings, Maoye International Holdings, and Rainbow Department Store Co. have either diversified their revenue streams, established sub-brands to beef up brand image, abandoned less profitable assets, or improved services with the help of digital technologies, according to the online publication focusing on commercial property news.

Rainbow, which was founded in 1984 and went public in Shenzhen in 2010, decided to upgrade its operations and services by going digital as early as 2015, the report said. It established an upscale supermarket brand, sp@ce, in 2017 to overhaul its image and has since expanded its online-to-offline services. By the end of last year, the company has opened 41 such supermarkets across the country.

The company also abandoned its convenience store business to streamline its operations. It sold its convenience store chain Well to Lawson last year, 10 years after it acquired the chain for 29 million yuan (US$4.5 million).

Although the company’s net profit has been on the decline for the past three years, Rainbow has logged steady growth in its online sales, with year-on-year increases of 42%, 283%, and 72% respectively over the past three years.

Maoye, which was founded in 1996 and listed its shares in Hong Kong in 2008, reported a 92.18% increase in net profit to 409 million yuan last year from a year ago, after recording a 83% slump in net profit a year earlier.

The company, now operating 48 brick-and-mortar stores in China, since 2019 has slowed down its steps of opening new outlets. It also resorted to digital technologies to expand sales channels, while seeking to improve customer loyalty by constantly introducing new brands, especially international cosmetics brands.

As a result, its two new sub-brands received 2.8 million new customers last year and sales rose 49% to 430 million yuan.

Shirble, which was founded in 1996 and went public in Hong Kong in 2010, is a relative latecomer in digitalization among Shenzhen retailers. It once tried to diversify its revenue sources by investing in real estate and later re-focused on retailing by teaming up with Alibaba’s Hema Supermarket. The firm reported a loss of 399 million yuan for 2021 as its revenue slid 52.2% to 230 million yuan.(Liu Minxia)