On 19 October, the Chinese supermarket chain Yonghui Superstores reopened a Beijing branch that has been transformed in the style of Pangdonglai (胖东来, DL), a viral supermarket chain that helped transform two stores for Yonghui. Despite Pangdonglai announcing that it won’t be helping to transform any more supermarkets after Yonghui sold a controlling stake to lifestyle retailer MINISO, Yonghui seems to have finished the transformation on its own.
The transformed supermarket is the Yonghui branch at the Xilongduo Plaza in the Shijingshan district in Beijing. It also marks the 10th transformed Yonghui Superstore since Pangdonglai started the process earlier this year. Yonghui released the store’s first-day results since reopening. The total footfall on 19 October was over 50,000, with 14,000 transactions made. The revenue on the first day was 1.70 million RMB (38,710.40 USD), six times the average daily sales pre-transformation.
However, perhaps due to the loss of novelty, the results did not surpass the 1.88 million RMB (263,985.62 USD) first-day revenue of the Zhengzhou, Henan store after its transformation this June. The Xinwan Plaza branch earned 58.35 million RMB (8.19 million USD) in July, averaging 1.87 million (262,581.44 USD) per day, 13.9 times the revenue compared to before the transformation.
With raising salaries for staff and supply chain optimisation, as well as the introduction of Pangdonglai’s DL-branded items, the transformations can be costly for Yonghui. But Yonghui had to take the gamble since it continued to take losses from 2021 to 2023, losing 8.84 billion RMB (1.24 billion USD), more than the 8.50 billion RMB (1.19 billion USD) of profit it earned between 2015 and 2020. The profitability brought in by the Pangdonglai mode was precisely the reason MINISO decided to invest. After the self Pangonglai-ised Beijing store, the 8 stores in 6 cities in Fujian, Guangdong and Liaoning are under transformation and in line for re-opening.
