Hema's hard discount format, "Super Hema NB," is accelerating its nationwide expansion efforts.
Recently, Super Hema NB opened six stores simultaneously in Beijing, covering multiple districts including Chaoyang, Changping, Tongzhou, and Huairou.
Low prices are the first impression Super Hema NB aims to leave on Beijing consumers. From 19.9 yuan per jin of golden pillow durian to 0.99 yuan per jin of watermelon, 16.9 yuan for 30 eggs, and 9.9 yuan for 24 bottles of mineral water, the stores led with aggressive pricing from the opening day.
As the first stop in North China, Beijing is positioned as a core strategic base for Super Hema NB. Subsequent store expansion, supply chain development, and warehouse network planning in North China will radiate outward from Beijing.
Beijing presents a challenging market. The historical lack of a dominant hard discount player in the city itself suggests this model is not easy to implement.
Facing relatively higher rents, more complex property conditions, and more dispersed consumption scenarios, Super Hema NB must maintain its low-price model while also re-evaluating store density, location efficiency, and local supply chain capabilities.
The expansion of Super Hema NB continues to extend outward. Starting from East China, it has entered South China, Anhui, and North China this year, with plans to launch in Southwest China soon, marking its transition from a regional format to a nationwide replication model.
According to its plan, Super Hema NB aims to surpass 600 total stores by the end of this year.
While many competitors are still refining their single-store models regionally, Super Hema NB has already taken the battle nationwide. The question is whether scale can further amplify its low-price advantage and support its capture of a larger share of the hard discount market.
The Strategy of Low Prices and Operational Efficiency
Inside a Super Hema NB store, many middle-aged and elderly customers can be seen carrying baskets, comparing prices, and lingering at the fresh produce and hot food counters. These cost-conscious, family-oriented consumers are precisely Super Hema NB's target demographic.
Super Hema NB defines its target users as "pragmatic families"—those who consume rationally and value cost-effectiveness—and uses the size of the local cooking population as a key criterion for site selection.
For these consumers, the need is to reliably purchase daily meals and essentials at lower cost and with less time.
Behind the low prices lies an operational and supply chain system centered on efficiency.
Super Hema NB's head of operations management stated that store operations emphasize "removing all redundancy," continuously providing "quality yet affordable" goods centered around daily meals.
This is first reflected in the product assortment.
Super Hema NB employs a "broad categories, narrow selection" product structure, with stores carrying about 1,500 SKUs, retaining only a few carefully chosen items in each subcategory.
Compared to traditional supermarkets that use a wider SKU range to cover more needs, Super Hema NB focuses on concentrating limited space and inventory on high-frequency items.
Private label and exclusive supply products are crucial supports for this narrow assortment model.
Currently, private label products account for nearly 60% of its assortment. This means Super Hema NB is not only compressing upstream procurement costs but also participating more deeply in product definition, using its own brands to reinforce the low-price perception and differentiate its offerings.
Simultaneously, it retains many co-branded or custom-made exclusive products with established brands, such as Nestle KitKat chocolate, Hsu Fu Chi pineapple cakes, Snow beer, and C&S tissues.
For Super Hema NB, which has just entered the Beijing market, such products can reduce consumer unfamiliarity with low-price goods and prevent the assortment from becoming overly generic, creating a buffer between low price and consumer trust.
According to Super Hema NB's head of frozen and refrigerated procurement, in private label development, the goal is to reconstruct the cost chain from factory to shelf, eliminating brand slotting fees, some intermediate logistics costs, and marketing expenses to reveal the true cost of the product.
In execution, this involves: first, controlling raw material costs through direct sourcing from production bases and origin warehouses; second, for goods like cooking oil, paper products, and dairy where logistics costs are a high proportion, finding suitable factories near cities to reduce transportation costs; and third, relying on store network growth to amortize the costs of single-item development, procurement, and distribution.
Super Hema NB attempts to strip out costs traditionally absorbed by channels, marketing, and multi-layer distribution from the product price, then reallocate them through scaled store networks and high-turnover goods.
The "subtraction" philosophy extends to store operations.
For example, store decoration and layout are more restrained, with tighter shelf spacing, typically only allowing two shopping carts to pass side-by-side.
The operations head explained that stores emphasize red lettering on white walls, bright lighting, and prominent signage so consumers can quickly find products and complete purchases. Super Hema NB also rarely uses promotional slogans like "today's special" or "limited-time discount," instead emphasizing stable low prices and making extensive use of paper price tags rather than electronic ones.
If prices don't fluctuate frequently, there's no need for frequent price changes and promotional maintenance, reducing store operational complexity.
A typical Super Hema NB store is staffed by about 15 to 20 employees, who are not limited to a single function but cover multiple areas including stocking, tidying, picking, packing, and sales.
Digitalization handles some of the judgment previously reliant on human experience. Super Hema NB uses weather data, urban consumption habits, and historical sales data for automatic ordering and replenishment to ensure stable supply of goods needed for daily meals by community residents.
All these designs ultimately serve Super Hema NB's determination to enter the community commerce sector with stable low prices.
Venturing Beyond the East China Comfort Zone
The hard discount business relies on scale and regional networks. Only with sufficiently dense stores can procurement, warehousing, distribution, fulfillment, and brand perception be amortized. This is also a challenge Super Hema NB must face as it aims for national expansion.
It's no coincidence that the hard discount format first gained momentum in East China, especially Shanghai.
The East China market has dense family consumption scenarios, a mature Yangtze River Delta supply chain, and intense retail competition. Consumers here accept quality consumption but are also willing to reallocate their shopping channels for stable low prices.
In the process of cross-city migration, Super Hema NB must first readjust its product assortment based on the dietary habits, consumption preferences, and supply chain conditions of different cities.
Super Hema NB revealed that about 30%-40% of the products in its Beijing stores are localized, a proportion similar to that in South China.
For goods more sensitive to freshness and taste, like short-shelf-life vegetables and chilled dairy drinks, Super Hema NB relies more on local or short-distance supply chains. For relatively easier-to-store goods like potatoes, tomatoes, and carrots, it emphasizes origin cost and supply chain efficiency.
However, supply chain efficiency depends not only on procurement capability but also on store density. The same low-price model will naturally operate less smoothly in the early stages in North China compared to the already scaled East China market.
The six stores newly opened in Beijing are mostly located within community living radii, covering areas like Chaoyang, Changping, Tongzhou, and Huairou. They are situated in community-type commercial areas, neighborhood centers, and small commercial complexes, with some directly built on the second floor of urban farmers' markets.
Super Hema NB's head of site selection and development stated that consumer habits, commercial environments, and property conditions vary significantly across different areas, and Super Hema NB is still testing community consumption demand in various scenarios.
Currently, Super Hema NB and Hema Xiansheng (Hema Fresh) operate independent warehousing and distribution systems. "Beijing is the base for North China. How the North China market develops will be considered more from the perspectives of density and breadth, but the premise is still warehouse network planning," the development head said.
"Ultimate convenience" is the primary logic for Super Hema NB's site selection. Stores don't necessarily have to be in the busiest, largest commercial complexes but must be in the most convenient locations for consumers to reach.
In terms of store formats, Super Hema NB currently focuses on two specifications: 600 square meters and 800 square meters.
In core urban areas with scarce properties and higher rents, stores tend to be compact 600 to 650 square meter street-front shops. In community neighborhood centers or small community malls, it deploys larger stores around 800 square meters to serve as anchor stores for the area.
An industry analyst noted that Super Hema NB's expansion is not starting from scratch. It builds upon over a decade of trial and error across multiple Hema brand lines, including Hema X Membership stores, with both failures and successes as a foundation.
In terms of scale alone, Super Hema NB is already a leader in the hard discount format.
To date, Super Hema NB has reached a scale of 550 stores. The second-ranked player, Aldi, has only 108 stores, all concentrated in Shanghai and Jiangsu. The third-ranked player, Meituan's Happy Monkey, which entered the hard discount sector less than a year ago, has only 40 stores.
The urgency of national expansion stems partly from the competition for prime offline locations within the broader framework of community retail competition. High-quality locations remain scarce, making it necessary to occupy consumers' daily supply radius first.
On the other hand, expansion itself is part of building backend supply chain capability.
Categories like snacks, beverages, paper products, grains and oils, daily chemicals, frozen standard products, and pre-packaged foods have relatively small regional differences, longer shelf lives, and lower loss rates, making them easier to standardize, procure centrally, and price uniformly.
What Super Hema NB aims to perfect is a hard discount flywheel: more stores lead to larger single-item procurement volumes, enabling better prices and custom products from suppliers; lower procurement costs and improved profits then support further store openings, spreading the same product assortment and supply chain to more communities.
From this perspective, the Beijing launch is not merely a regional move but a crucial test for Super Hema NB as it transitions from its stronghold in East China to nationwide replication.
For the entire hard discount industry, the national war has just begun.
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