Recently, as the first clothing enterprise listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Shanghai Stock Exchange, La chapel can be said to be in constant turmoil. Due to the company's performance loss, La chapel's retail stores are shrinking rapidly.
CCTV financial reporter found in the investigation that even those shops that have not been closed are carrying out clearance sales.
La chapel closed stores frequently in the first half of the year, and clothes were sold in stock
Recently, when visiting major shopping malls in Shanghai, the reporter found that the stores of women's clothing brand La chapel seem to be less than before. Many stores that can be searched on the mobile phone map have been closed and removed.
Some La chapel stores have posted posters of clearance sale, and there are strong discounts on down clothes, coats and other clothes displayed in the store.
Clerk of La chapel store, Changning Road, Shanghai: it's all 30% off, and there's also 20% off.
Shanghai consumers: the discount of 1099 yuan is more than 400 yuan. You can also give a 10% discount for three pieces. If you give a 10% discount, you should also save more than 100 yuan.
Reporter: do you think it's worth it?
Shanghai Consumer: I feel that the workmanship is not very good and the variety is not complete.
The clerk told reporters that the new clothes of La chapel in that season have not been put on the shelves. It is a special sale from September 26 to October 20. The clothes in stock last year and the year before last are sold at a discount. At present, he has not received the notice of putting the new clothes on the shelves.
Clerk of La chapel store, Changning Road, Shanghai: we haven't been notified so far. Anyway, the special sale is until the 20th. It's possible that we can't talk about the rent of our store, and we may withdraw here, because we sign the contract once a year, and the rent rises too much. We're talking about it, but we haven't talked about it yet.
The reporter found that at the beginning of the A-share listing in 2017, La chapel had 9066 outlets, but the situation deteriorated sharply in the first half of this year. As of June 30, 2019, the number of retail outlets in La chapel was 6799, a sharp decrease of 2470 in half a year, a decrease of 27%, and an average of 13 stores were closed every day.
In the garment industry, inventory is the most difficult pressure for enterprises. The interim performance report of La chapel also shows that as of June 30, 2019, the book value of La chapel's inventory is as high as 2.16 billion yuan!
New products can't be updated in time, and old products can't be sold. What impact will such a high inventory have on La chapel?
In order to understand the real situation of La chapel's current inventory, the reporter visited La chapel's warehousing and logistics center. From the announcement information, La chapel mainly has three logistics bases, which are located in Taicang, Tianjin and Chengdu, and undertake the functions of store distribution, replenishment and nearby delivery of online orders.
Reporter Jin hemiao: No. LL6, Guangzhou East Road, Taicang City, Jiangsu Province. From the map, this is La chapel logistics center. According to public data, by the end of 2018, the total assets of La chapel clothing (Taicang) Co., Ltd. had reached 1.2 billion yuan, of which the net assets had exceeded 80 million yuan. On December 26, 2018, Taicang lashia applied for bank loans with the real estate here as collateral, and the mortgage guarantee period expires on December 26 this year.
The reporter observed in Taicang for several days. As La chapel's logistics center in East China, the daily operation here is not busy. There are two or three trucks parked in the open space in the plant area. There are express vehicles at the gate. Several employees are handling and sorting inventory. You can see that the shelves of the warehouse are full of cartons.
Most of the clothes sold in the factory stores here are out of season clothes. The lowest price women's coat only costs 29 yuan. The clothing brand OTR, which has just applied for bankruptcy liquidation, is also sold. In the corner of the store, there are also many cartons with the words of out of season products written on them.
Hao Shuai, chief analyst of textile and garment industry of Guotai Junan Securities Research Institute: the discount has basically brought a gross profit loss of 1.1 billion to China Daily. Coupled with a large number of store closures, there is a one-time cost.
The continuous expansion of inventory scale has increased the cash flow pressure of La chapel. The reporter found that from 2014 to 2018, the net cash flow from La chapel's operating activities decreased year by year from 855 million yuan to 157 million yuan.
Turning to the business history of La chapel, La chapel was listed in September 2017. In that year, its revenue reached 10.446 billion yuan, ranking among the women's clothing listed enterprises with the highest revenue in China.
However, two years later, La chapel's net profit has shown a loss of 565 million yuan in the first half of the year. What made La Chapelle experience such a big fluctuation?
Reporter Jin hemiao: This is the headquarters office building of La chapel group in Minhang District, Shanghai. It is understood that it has just been put into use for more than a year. Founder Xing Jiaxing said in an interview that in the face of performance loss and debt crisis, La chapel will also choose to sell real estate to tide over the difficulties, At present, you can see that posters for external rent have been posted under the office building.
Subsequently, the reporter called the rental phone on the poster and learned that at present, the decoration of building B in La chapel park has been completed and all buildings are rented out.
Mr. Gao, contact person of the poster for renting: we rented the whole building directly to lashia. It started on October 1 and was almost renovated. The house was just delivered on October 15.
From the performance report, La chapel mainly engaged in women's clothing, but invested heavily in infrastructure projects such as the headquarters park. In June 2018, Shanghai Weile, a wholly-owned subsidiary of La chapel, applied to the bank for a loan of no more than 436 million yuan. The mortgage object was the headquarters park located in Wujing Town, Shanghai. In that year, the company's net profit suffered a loss for the first time, with a loss of RMB 199 million. By 2019, the book value of Wujing headquarters base project will reach 558 million yuan, and the net profit loss of the company will expand to 565 million yuan in the first half of the year.
Yu Jian, chief analyst of textile and clothing at Zhejiang Securities Research Institute: it is difficult to accept that they are a heavy asset, so there will be store closures and promotions, including these so-called "broken arm survival", which are actually reducing their business burden, but this time may be longer.