Major changes! Industry giant SHEIN responds to IPO rumors

As a golden signboard in the overseas fast fashion industry, SHEIN's every move has attracted much attention. Earlier, many industry leaders wanted to seize the market and began to follow SHEIN's footsteps and create independent e-commerce platforms that were highly comparable to SHEIN, but all with little success. Now, SHEIN has undergone major changes, which has aroused heated discussions among people in the industry, and they are also curious about the key to SHEIN's success.

Will SHEIN restart its US IPO ?

It is understood that SHEIN's holding entity has been changed to Roadget Business Pte. LTD, a company established in Singapore in 2019. The company already owns the SHEIN trademark transferred by Guangzhou SHEIN International Import and Export Co., Ltd. and Hong Kong Zoetop Business Co., Ltd. Since the end of 2021, the company has become the legal entity operating SHEIN, and Xu Yangtian and four others are representatives of the company.

In addition, there are also reports that SHEIN founder Xu Yangtian has changed his nationality to Singaporean. However, according to the response of a SHEIN spokesperson, the change of the headquarters address is to better set up multi-center operations and promote the development of local business. At the same time, the company's listing plan and the rumors that founder Xu Yangtian changed his nationality were denied.

But it is undeniable that SHEIN is stepping up its expansion in Singapore. On the social platform LinkedIn, SHEIN's profile shows that its headquarters is located in Singapore; SHEIN's domestic parent company "Nanjing Lingtian Information Technology Co., Ltd." had its business license revoked on April 23, 2021; SHEIN 's user agreement signing entity has been changed to Roadget Business Pte ; its founder Xu Yangtian is no longer the legal person of any domestic company.

At the same time, SHEIN is actively recruiting to expand the size of its Singapore office, and it is expected to increase the number of employees in Singapore to about 200 by the end of the year. On Singapore's official employment website MyCareersFuture, SHEIN has posted 15 junior and senior positions including senior e-commerce data analyst, senior security analysis engineer, senior data scientist and senior social media marketing expert .

Industry insiders speculate that SHEIN is very likely to move its headquarters to Singapore to pave the way for a simplified capitalization process in the future. If SHEIN successfully lists in New York, it will be the first major equity transaction of a Chinese company in the United States since July 2021. There are also media reports that Xu Yangtian is considering changing his nationality to bypass overseas IPO regulations in response to the tightening of scrutiny of Chinese companies' overseas listings in China and the United States, but this news has been denied by SHEIN.

Even if it does not move towards capitalization, it cannot be denied that SHEIN, with its rapid development momentum, has become the most eye-catching unicorn in the venture capital circle. Earlier, SHEIN successively won multiple rounds of financing from investment giants including IDG, Sequoia China, Tiger Global Fund, Shunwei Capital, etc., and with the growth of its own sales, the support of both parties directly pushed SHEIN's value to double, which is expected to reach about US$50 billion.

In addition, industry analysts predict that SHEIN's revenue in the past two years has exceeded 10 billion US dollars, and its sales in 2021 are likely to increase to 15.7 billion US dollars, equivalent to 100 billion yuan, which is close to Zara's parent company. With the support of hard power and soft power, it is expected that it will only be a matter of time before SHEIN surpasses Zara in the future.

Keep going! How did SHEIN win?

Before SHEIN came into being, when it came to fast fashion, consumers around the world had a common impression of many styles and low prices . But after SHEIN came into being, fast fashion seemed to be no longer that simple.

Compared with other platforms or stores, the trendy styles are one of the characteristics of SHEIN platform products. What really surprises consumers is that the price is half the price of cheap fast fashion brands . It is understood that there are more than 600,000 products on the SHEIN platform, but the average unit price is less than $8. There are many skirts priced at $10 and necklaces priced at $2.

In recent years, SHEIN has had a large number of users from more than 150 countries and regions, and its products are particularly popular in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Australia and other places.

SHEIN has gained a large number of fans with its price advantage, but the creation of this price advantage relies on a strong supply chain. The export of clothing brands has extremely high requirements for the supply chain, with shorter delivery cycles and stricter real-time control requirements, which poses many challenges.

In Panyu, Guangzhou, there are many small and medium-sized garment processing factories, hundreds of which are SHEIN's core suppliers. To a certain extent, the reason why SHEIN's daily average new product volume can reach 5,000-7,000 SKUs is absolutely related to the powerful domestic suppliers.

However, SHEIN has never stopped moving forward in terms of supply chain . Recently, it was reported that SHEIN, known as the " Pinduoduo of the clothing industry ", has started preliminary work on its supply chain headquarters project in the Greater Bay Area, with an investment of 15 billion yuan. This project will further strengthen SHEIN's control over the supply chain, and SHEIN's ability to integrate small and medium-sized clothing factories with a "flexible supply chain" will also be further enhanced.

As a benchmark for independent sites, SHEIN has gradually become a role model for many sellers and Internet giants in the industry. Reproduction and benchmarking are also common, but there are very few "imitators" who can make breakthroughs in the two key points of supply chain and brand .

At the end of January last year , ByteDance launched an independent website to compete with SHEIN - DMONSTUDIO , but in less than a month, news came that the website would cease operations on February 11, and its survival period would only be 100 days.

At that time, many industry insiders discussed the news of DMONSTUDIO's closure, and many of them believed that "from the supply chain perspective, SHEIN already has an absolute advantage." Secondly, SHEIN's mature business, including the traffic, experience, and user groups accumulated over the years, cannot be easily imitated or borrowed.

According to foreign media reports, SHEIN took advantage of the trend of global consumption shifting to the Internet during the epidemic and successfully created a revenue of about 100 billion yuan in 2021. Although SHEIN is still developing rapidly, there are actually some hidden concerns.

First of all, there is the obvious problem of competition . SHEIN's rapid development has attracted a large number of competitors with similar positioning to SHEIN; secondly, SHEIN's image of high quality and low price has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people for many years, and it is not easy to get involved in the high-end field ; finally, due to SHEIN's fast speed and large volume of new product launches, infringement issues are also inevitable.

However, SHEIN, the industry benchmark, still attracts batches of imitators, all of whom are trying to create the next SHEIN...

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