24-Hour Convenience Store OurHours Closes 400 Beijing Locations
The time of reckoning has come for the convenience store chain OurHours (全時 quánshí).
Once a dominant force in China's 24-hour store market, the company has
been forced to close all 800 of its stores across the country because of
poor economic performance.
The brand has since been bought up by two companies: Japanese convenience store giant Lawson has
taken nearly 100 branches in southeast China and Chongqing, whereas the
remaining 700 stores – 400 of which are located in the capital – have
been bought by Tianjin-based firm Shanhai Lantu.
OurHours
was founded in 2011 and quickly found modest success. Early positive
results were followed by an unprecedented boom within the retailer
market beginning in 2016, when companies looked for private fundraising,
securing the industry an estimated RMB 10 billion by early 2017. Riding
on this wave of investment, OurHours, as with many of its peers, grew
even more ambitious and announced that it intended to open stores in 100
cities by 2022. By July 2018, it had only found a foothold in ten.
The convenience store chain has fallen on hard times after an unprecedented boom in 2016
However,
despite the business appearing to expand, a crackdown on peer-to-peer
lending in 2016 caused a financial crisis within OurHours' parent
company Forise Holdings (复华置地 fùhuá tǔdì, foriseland.com). Between November 2018 and February this year, nearly a quarter of the Beijing-based branches had already been shut down.
OurHours is not the only victim of this rapid expansion. Lin+ and 131, two other major convenience store chains, were also both forced to shut around August of last year.
The
closure of these homegrown convenience stores means that the remaining
players are battling it out for corner store supremacy. Dmall and Suning, for example, have vowed to open 150 and 500 stores, respectively, this year alone.
Whoever
comes out on top might want to take pointers from the Japanese imports,
who, let's be honest, just do the whole convenience store thing better,
especially when it comes to their fresh food selection.
READ: Beijing-Based GuCycle Closes Overnight, Rides Off With Everyone's Money
Photo: Caijing News (yicai.com), longsok.com
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