Recently, china's leading kitchen staple food enterprise, Shiyue Daotian, released its 2024 mid-term financial report.

The financial report shows that in the first half of the year, Shiyue Daotian achieved revenue of 2.621 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.7%, maintaining a fast growth rate on the basis of continuous growth; the adjusted net income was 0.149 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30.6%, reflecting a significant improvement in overall profitability.

Combining industry data, Shiyue Daotian's revenue growth rate outperformed the social zero growth rate of the same period in the grain and oil food category, leading the grain and oil industry, also one of the few companies in the industry recording both revenue and net income growth, with improved development resilience and competitiveness.

One important reason is the release of innovative momentum by Shiyue Daotian. Specifically, let's explore along the two core dimensions of products and channels.

Innovative development of corn products, forming the second growth curve

Looking at the financial data, in the first half of the year, Shiyue Daotian's revenue increment mainly came from miscellaneous grains, beans, and other product categories. The revenue of this category reached 0.726 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 151.9%, with revenue share increasing to 27.7%, mitigating the short-term impact of adjusting rice sales prices and product portfolios, ensuring overall high-speed growth.

Source: Company Financial Report

The rapid growth in revenue of this category is mainly due to Shiyue Daotian actively exerting efforts in new categories and products, achieving a breakthrough in corn product sales, with the underlying logic being innovation to meet consumer demand.

From the perspective of categories, the public's demand for staple foods has gradually evolved from filling up to focusing on health, nutrition, and feeling unburdened. Corn has become a new type of staple food in line with this trend. Additionally, the public's demand for convenient and diversified dining has collectively driven the upgrade of its supply side. Against this background, the pace of corn branding and marketization has accelerated, with Shiyue Daotian's forward-looking layout making it the leading brand in the corn track.

From a product perspective, Shiyue Daotian has made many innovations in product forms, successively developing over 30 products covering sub-categories such as corn sticks, corn segments, corn kernels, popcorn kernels, suitable for staple food, snacks, supplementary food scenes, and developing small packaging designs to fully meet the above-mentioned demands. The layout of corn has enabled Shiyue Daotian to enter the fast-moving consumer goods market, enhancing its ability to increase product value and profit margins.

In terms of actual sales volume, according to reports, Shiyue Daotian's corn products have been certified by Frost & Sullivan as the national leader in corn sales (as of March 2024 data), and continue to top major e-commerce platforms.

Furthermore, the deeper reason why Shiyue Daotian's corn sales lead is its complete transformation of corn, a primary agricultural product, throughout the entire chain, creating highly competitive products through quality and efficiency innovations.

Shiyue Daotian currently has corn planting bases in Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Northeast China, Ukraine, and the usa are collectively referred to as the 'Three Golden Corn Belts,' where the corn grown has unique advantages in nutrition and taste. At the same time, Shiyue Daotian has automated factories located near the planting areas to ensure that corn only takes less than 6 hours from the fields to the factories, maximizing the freshness of the corn.

These series of measures involving the development of high-quality production areas and scarce resources, as well as the accumulation of long-term operations, are difficult to replicate, building a strong moat for Shiyue Daotian.

Optimizing a multi-channel ecosystem to support business expansion.

From the channel perspective, in the first half of the year, the online channel sector of Shiyue Daotian maintained a fast growth rate of 14.3%, consolidating its competitive advantage; the offline channel sector revenue accounted for 32.2%, increasing by about 2 percentage points, with all three major segmented channel revenues realizing growth, continuously optimizing the multi-channel ecosystem.

Source: Company Financial Report

Furthermore, Shiyue Daotian pays more attention to the layout of high-potential channels, further releasing the space for income and profit on both ends.

It can be seen that it has adjusted the structure of online channels, reducing investment in low-margin channels on e-commerce platforms while opening new stores on several social e-commerce platforms, increasing promotion and brand exposure, driving a significant increase in self-operated store income by 203.2%; actively expanding offline channels like modern supermarkets, direct customers, etc., boosting product sales and brand influence through high-traffic physical retail spaces, strengthening cooperation with dining companies, anchoring the high-quality development trend of the dining industry, driving revenue growth of modern supermarkets and direct customer channels by 35.2% and 24%, respectively.

Behind this, Shiyue Daotian has established professional operation teams tailored to the characteristics of each channel, continuously exploring development experiences of various channels, reorganizing rules, taking a unique development path with refined operations, and enhancing marketing innovation, such as launching airport large screen ads and escalator ads in offline channels, improving brand and category communication efficiency, achieving super exposure, helping consumers recognize the brand in 3 seconds, fully stimulating multi-channel efficiency.

This also provides solid support for Shiyue Daotian to create new flagship products.

Taking corn as an example, after launching corn products, Shiyue Daotian quickly promoted its widespread distribution channels, including deepening cooperation with jd.com, tmall, Douyin platform, modern supermarkets, dealer networks, and accelerating word-of-mouth marketing offline, leveraging multi-channel efficiency to continuously increase sales. In July, the corn category also initiated a new round of nationwide offline dealer recruitment, expected to bring about accelerated growth once again.

Conclusion

Overall, the resilience and elasticity of Shiyue Daotian's performance are becoming more prominent. The breakthrough from rice to corn categories, as well as the layout of deep cultivation in a multi-channel ecological system, have enabled it to upgrade its business structure, enhance risk resistance, and find more growth opportunities.

This also brings more development possibilities and imagination for the future. Shiyue Daotian can realize more performance from it, and strategically replicate and iterate on this already verified mature model, break through in more new staple food categories, and form multiple growth curves.