A blue box drives tens of thousands of yuan in consumption? Industrial research industry Taobao upstream manufacturing? There is a service hidden behind the industry in Shanghai
Years ago, when people wore big brands, they often intentionally or unintentionally revealed their labels. However, this kind of "showing off" has now been replaced by another trend - those 90s and 00s who wear trendy shoes always like to keep a luminous fragrance anti-counterfeiting buckle on their shoes. This special "accessory" is the "genuine seal" of the products sold by the Shanghai trendy online shopping community's Dewu App. Under this guarantee, the purchasing power of users of the Dewu App is more than 5 times higher than that of other consumer e-commerce platforms.
In addition to supporting the fashion consumption industry in Shanghai with high-quality inspection and testing services, supply chain services and scientific services are also unique in the fields of manufacturing, industry, academia, and research in Shanghai. These services all revolve around production and manufacturing, known as the "productive service industry". Recently, in the opinions of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee on deepening high-level reform and opening up and promoting high-quality development, it is particularly emphasized to "leverage the empowering role of productive service industries in industrial upgrading.". A recent survey by reporters found that the productive service industry in Shanghai, which originated at the beginning of this century, has formed a leading advantage nationwide, reflecting the professionalism and high-end style that Shanghai should have.
Ultimate "authenticity"
Dewu may have the world's largest product research and frontline identification team, with its inspection and identification center located in Jiading, witnessing this hardcore strength. Every day, a large number of orders and packages enter the center, and each item needs to go through eight major processes: quality inspection, photography and filing, multiple identification, and independent binding before it can be packed into the "Aurora Blue" box and delivered to consumers.
The "one mirror to the bottom" service area of the center is responsible for quality inspection and identification of luggage with a transaction price of over 10000 yuan. The reporter saw that in a single area, there are dozens of tables, each with two quality inspectors and two discriminators assigned to each package. At the same time, only two people sit on each table, which means that each package will undergo a "double-blind" test. One pair of quality inspectors and discriminators will be removed after entering the field, and the other pair will be removed again without communication. After multiple verifications, opinions will be given.
A highly imitated GUCCI bucket bag ultimately failed to escape the scrutiny. The discriminator Xi Xi has conducted thousands of studies on the same brand and style of bags. She told reporters that the black label sewn inside the bag is a anti-counterfeiting technical barrier set by the brand, and counterfeiters are still unable to break through it. After verification, the black label in this package is indeed the true label. But the appraiser still noticed something suspicious, including black stitching, font details on hardware accessories, etc. After multiple people conducted cross identification and laboratory material testing, the package was determined to be fake and the real label was sewn onto the fake package.
And the fashion shoe identification camp is like an automated and intelligent factory. Due to the continuous growth of orders, the warehouse has adopted fully automated transmission lines and auxiliary loading and unloading robots. The product has completed the shooting of 27 high-definition multi-dimensional photos per second during the transfer of the conveyor belt, in order to store evidence. Hundreds of identical "Li Gui" pairs have been intercepted here, and the shoe insoles, air cushions, and other items are all made of original materials. However, the small holes in the insoles, the pull line on the midsole, and the brushing method still expose the details of the fraud. Appraiser Xiaopeng said that his courage to "declare judgments" comes from billions of times of identification research and practical operations. Through global procurement, Dewu has a genuine sample library of over 100000 products from over 1500 brands covering 13 consumer categories such as shoes, fashion clothes, watches, handmade items, and beauty. Through data collection, comparison, filing, sample disassembly, and testing, we have written identification research reports for each product, becoming a practical guide for frontline appraisers. The longest report exceeds a hundred pages.
Even more extreme is that for products such as watches and trendy toys that cannot be opened, non-destructive identification can be achieved through methods such as "perspective". We are willing to purchase dozens of high-precision and cutting-edge equipment such as scanning electron microscopes, Fourier transform infrared spectrometers, 3D ultra depth of field digital microscopes, and X-ray fluorescence spectrometers to achieve scientific research level identification. As a result, a copy of the assembly table with parts from different watches was exposed under the CT instrument. Whether a piece of Hotan Jade was pure or not, the wave peak in a specific area depicted by the infrared spectrometer should also help the discriminator to draw a conclusion.
The head of the identification team told reporters that experts from China Inspection Group, a national team, have jointly established a research team for the identification of objects. The two sides often engage in detailed discussions on difficult issues, often focusing on one detail and taking a long time to consider. It is precisely this extreme "comparison" that allows consumers to confidently make purchases, and it is not uncommon for orders worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan to be placed on platforms. After inspecting the inspection and identification warehouse, the Production and Service Industry Department of the Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology couldn't help but sigh, "Here, tens of thousands of Aurora Blue Boxes flow to the whole country every day, each with high-quality and high value-added Shanghai characteristics."
Involving "Intelligent Manufacturing"
Authenticity detection services have greatly promoted the development of the fashion consumer industry, and professional services are also needed in the industrial sector.
MRO refers to materials used for maintenance, repair, and equipment operation in production, and its procurement has always been an unavoidable pain for the manufacturing industry. For example, before the emergence of hypermarkets, households had to go door-to-door to different stores for oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, electrical sockets, pots and pans, etc. MRO is the same, for those highly scattered screws, fasteners, etc., the procurement value is not high but it is extremely time-consuming. So, Shanghai began to nurture the "Taobao of the industrial goods industry". In 2014, Zhenkunxing Industrial Supermarket opened its industrial e-commerce business, connecting upstream suppliers and downstream enterprises with the Internet and digitalization, realizing transparency and comparable prices of goods, and rapidly growing into a one-stop industrial supplies procurement management service platform leading in China. At present, Zhenkunxing has established 17 million SKUs, serving a total of 100000 customers. Customers have significantly reduced costs and increased efficiency, and even reduced the original procurement team by two-thirds.
Rooted in fertile industrial soil, Shanghai not only gave birth to Zhenkunxing. In the fields of steel, electromechanical, chemical, integrated circuits, etc., Shanghai's industrial e-commerce has an absolute advantage, such as the Western Regions supply chain, Yunhan Xincheng, and Weipu Chemical. But being in a leading position does not mean stopping exploration. In July of this year, Zhenkunxing established a 31000 square meter research and intelligent manufacturing base in Taicang.
As a channel oriented company, why is it involved in research and development manufacturing? Chairman Chen Long's logic is that industrial e-commerce has data in hand and understands the urgent needs of customers the most. "If 20% of high-end fasteners still rely on imports, we hope to collaborate with partners to develop domestic substitute products as soon as possible. For example, for customers who require a large number of non-standard long tail products, we plan to use intelligent manufacturing to quickly respond and achieve costs that could only be achieved through large-scale production in the past. This can create greater value for customers and expand the depth of services."
Exploring "Physical Properties"
Heroes have similar opinions. Chen Long's "backtracking" has been practiced by Titan Technology for several years. As a one-stop shopping platform for laboratory supplies, Titan Technology is committed to researching "physical properties" and has established nearly 500 acres of bases in Shanghai, Anhui, and Hubei, focusing on domestic substitution of equipment such as nuclear magnetic resonance analyzers and key reagents used in liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. It has now established six independent brands.
In 2007, Titan Technology was founded by students from East China University of Science and Technology with the aim of solving laboratory research pain points. In 2020, it became the "first scientific service company" in China. So far, Titan Technology has served over 50000 clients in engineering universities, biomedical, materials, energy fields, disease control, and food and drug supervision across the country.
This type of "scientific service" may seem obscure, but it runs through the entire process of scientific discovery and technological invention, supporting the entire innovation chain from theoretical assumptions, experimental verification, technological application, pilot scale transformation to production quality control. It is particularly crucial for national independent innovation. For example, Xie Yingbo, founder of Titan Technology, gave an example of a client who entered large-scale production after a pilot plant, with an investment of only 100 million yuan in analysis and testing equipment. But without this 100 million yuan, the lifeline of customer quality and the annual output value of billions of yuan would be impossible to talk about.
There is a science service giant in the United States, Thermo Fisher Scientific, whose market value has grown from $20 billion to over $210 billion in the past decade. In China, the science service track is still in its early stages, and there are too many new services that Xie Yingbo wants to launch. He said that the success rate of scaling up the conversion process of experimental results in domestic universities is not high, and one important factor is the unstable quality of the raw materials used between batches. Currently, laboratory design in China is relatively backward, and newly built laboratories lack human-computer interaction and intelligent facilities. "So, can we utilize the company's mature quality control system and analysis and testing platform to provide standard large packaging for universities, institutions, and corporate customers, specifically for pilot and production use, to ensure consistency between batches and reliability of storage and transportation? We are also independently developing and constructing an intelligent research and development platform to achieve modular output of the intelligent laboratory, so that the screening of active compounds can exceed 10000 times per day. Let scientists focus on innovative research and development, which is the best service we can provide to them."
This may be the aspiration of Shanghai's productive service industry - to always strive for self-improvement and iteration, not only to match transactions and earn price differences, but also to deeply empower and transform the industry.
According to reporters, at the beginning of this century, services derived from the manufacturing industry in Shanghai, such as general contracting and integration, third-party logistics, and financing leasing, have already begun to emerge. In 2008, the added value of Shanghai's productive service industry reached 418.8 billion yuan, accounting for 30.06% of the city's GDP. In March 2009, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology established the first "Production Service Industry Office" nationwide. In the same year, Shanghai began to plan and construct productive service industry functional zones from a high starting point, and later issued specific guidelines to set clear requirements for the land output intensity of functional zones. So far, Shanghai has built 45 functional zones, gathering more than 40000 enterprises and 470000 employees. Among them, the revenue of the Shibei functional zone per square kilometer has reached 60 billion yuan.
