Editor's Note from Era Finance: "The more unicorn enterprises in a place, the better the entrepreneurial ecosystem." Over the past year, more than 500 new unicorn enterprises were born globally, with China ranking second in the number of unicorns, and Guangzhou being the city with the fastest growth in the number of unicorns domestically. Unicorn enterprises are the main force in opening up new fields and new tracks, the reserve force for leading technology enterprises, and the main force for technology backbone enterprises. To a certain extent, they represent the direction of economic transformation and upgrading. For this reason, Era Finance, in cooperation with Agricultural Bank of China Guangzhou Branch, has launched the high-end interview column "Finding Unicorns in Guangzhou," focusing on Guangzhou's unicorn enterprises, future unicorns, and seed unicorn enterprises, paying attention to the strategic planning, business development, and capital operation stories of these technology innovation enterprises.

In "Invent and Wander," Bezos proposes the difference between long-termism and short-termism, which is the difference between being missionary and mercenary. To evaluate a person and a company, one must see whether they are committed with passion or like mercenaries seeking quick profits. Missionary and mercenary are two English words with similar pronunciation but completely different meanings, cleverly highlighting different attitudes toward work and the future.

After 26 years of hard work in the automotive aftermarket, Zeng Wangui, Chairman and Founder of Baturu, has advanced steadily with a long-term investment attitude. "In this industry, what is needed more is accumulation, understanding, and patience." In 2013, Zeng Wangui founded Guangzhou Baturu Information Technology Co., Ltd., empowering the industry with industrial internet to build a "standard chain" that facilitates the flow of the industry's upstream and downstream.

This year, Baturu celebrated its 10th anniversary and has deeply connected 120,000+ automotive aftermarket industry participants, including automotive parts manufacturers/dealers, automotive dealer groups, maintenance chains, second-hand car platforms, mobility platforms, insurance companies, etc., helping the industry achieve digital transformation and upgrading. In recent years, Baturu has been consecutively listed as a Guangzhou unicorn enterprise and a Great Wall China unicorn enterprise, and has been selected for the Hurun Industrial Internet Future Stars and Deloitte Guangzhou High-tech High-growth 20 Strong Enterprises, among other lists.

1. Seizing the Opportunity of Industrial Internet

Around 2000, China's consumer internet emerged and developed rapidly like a prairie fire. Subsequently, with the maturation of mobile internet, the ceiling of consumer internet gradually lowered. Industrial internet took over the second half of digital economy development, applying its concepts and technologies to traditional industries.

At that time, Zeng Wangui observed: In the automotive aftermarket, whether it's supply chain, chains, second-hand cars, etc., there is currently no enterprise with high market share. In the traditional automotive aftermarket, especially in the parts distribution field, upstream and downstream are extremely fragmented, with many intermediary links, no standards or rules, and highly dependent on manual labor. As a result, services at each link are in a very primitive and backward state, with low distribution efficiency and poor service experience.

Having worked in the traditional automotive parts field for many years, Zeng Wangui keenly realized that a new digital wave was coming. Bringing internet technology to the automotive parts industry, integrating online transactions with offline fulfillment and delivery, and using standardization and intelligence to solve automotive aftermarket supply chain problems, was precisely the opportunity for enterprises focused on the automotive aftermarket to grow stronger.

In 2013, Zeng Wangui quickly seized the opportunity of industrial internet development and founded Baturu. From its inception, Baturu aimed to solve the pain points of weak supply chain infrastructure and low standardization in the automotive aftermarket.

"So what Baturu focused on from the beginning was to complete the connection of upstream and downstream supply chains in the form of a full-vehicle parts trading platform, using internet technology to create a closed-loop system of online order automatic processing and offline fulfillment and delivery—this is a set of basic service infrastructure for the aftermarket supply chain, including data, systems, warehousing and distribution, and channels." Zeng Wangui stated.

In February 2014, after multiple rounds of environmental testing and transaction simulation, Baturu's full-vehicle parts trading service platform "Auto Parts Shop" officially launched. Through this, a closed-loop system from online trading to offline fulfillment and service was gradually established, providing terminal customers (automotive repair enterprises) with comprehensive, accurate, fast, and economical full-vehicle parts supply chain services, and accumulating a vast parts database, systems, and supply chain capabilities.

To date, "Auto Parts Shop" has become the most professional and comprehensive full-vehicle parts trading platform in the country, providing one-stop services from parts search, price comparison, payment to delivery and after-sales. The platform has gathered over 2,000 quality parts factories and dealers at home and abroad, cumulatively serving over 100,000 automotive repair enterprises, with service coverage in over 20 provinces/autonomous regions and 300+ cities.

2. Building Standards from Zero to One

With the launch of "Auto Parts Shop," Baturu continued to advance.

After establishing a self-operated full-vehicle parts supply chain platform in the first phase, in 2020, Baturu upgraded its partnership model to a franchise model, providing franchisees with full-vehicle parts supply chain + systems + operational empowerment, and began piloting a "SaaS+" model for terminal customers, providing not only quality supply chains but also SaaS services to help them digitalize their internal operational management.

After exploration, practice, and reflection in the first two phases, Baturu, through platform services and after accumulating strong industry infrastructure, comprehensively upgraded its "SaaS + Supply Chain" strategy, opening up the platform capabilities honed and accumulated over many years to the entire industry, providing integrated solutions based on "data + systems + supply chain + operational capabilities" to each industry participant, helping every enterprise strengthen and grow their business.

To this end, Baturu deconstructed its accumulated capabilities into modules and combined them according to the needs and scenarios of different industry participants, launching comprehensive digital solutions covering the entire industry from supply end, distribution end to demand end, targeting automotive parts factories, automotive dealer groups, second-hand car platforms, mobility platforms, etc.

On this basis, by adding supply to the supply end and adding inventory to the traffic end, using "SaaS + Supply Chain" to connect industry upstream and downstream, gradually achieving efficient supply-demand matching and improving industry efficiency.

Discussing the continuous advancement over ten years of development, Zeng Wangui frankly admitted that establishing standards is the most fundamental and core logic, and also the most challenging thing. "This is a process of continuous verification and adjustment."

Zeng Wangui revealed that he started working on industry "standardization" as early as 2009, before founding Baturu. "I wanted to leverage the resource advantages I had accumulated from years of automotive parts wholesale. At that time, I took prefecture-level cities as units and assembled 11 automotive brands, making parts comprehensive for these 11 brands." From the continuous expansion of 11 automotive brands to establishing the industry's most comprehensive vehicle brand database, this also laid the foundation for Baturu's later standardization work.

In this process, Zeng Wangui discovered that repair shops, as parts purchasers, often understood parts according to "linguistic" logic, while parts in supplier warehouses, distinguished by different years, colors, etc., numbered in the tens of thousands. Understanding by name was inefficient, resulting in miscommunication between supply and demand sides.

Based on this, Baturu early on built a massive parts database, serving as an industry language "converter" and standardizing data. It assigned each part a "digital ID" that could identify production year, manufacturer, price, model, and other information, enabling supply and demand sides to communicate directly and precisely.

After data standardization was achieved, getting repair shops to recognize and skillfully use a completely new procurement method became a new challenge.

Zeng Wangui stated that for a long time, the trading model formed in the automotive parts market made parts procurement highly dependent on personal relationships and offline relationship maintenance, unlike buying daily necessities where people take action immediately after seeing TV or mobile phone advertisements.

"This product was disruptive at the time," Zeng Wangui recalled. To quickly open the market, at that time 2-3 ground promotion staff were stationed in each region, starting ground promotion from areas like Guangzhou, Zhanjiang, Zhongshan, Zhaoqing, and Dongguan, visiting shops one by one and teaching them one by one.

In October 2014, an automotive repair shop in Shiqi District, Zhongshan purchased a pair of gearbox cooling oil pipes with a total price of 880 yuan on Auto Parts Shop. With parts number 2042701127, it became Baturu Auto Parts Shop's first transaction order.

"As long as awareness increases and merchants, after using the product, can directly feel the reduction in costs and improvement in efficiency, we have the confidence to continue expanding scale."

From the first customer to now connecting and serving a cumulative 100,000 customers, Zeng Wangui sighed that "the automotive aftermarket is a very large track, but one cannot think about making 'quick money'; one must have a long-term spirit."

3. Making Transactions and Services Simpler

Industrial internet brought opportunities to Baturu, and Baturu's growth has also promoted the mature development of the automotive aftermarket industry.

Since 2021, Baturu has developed mature cases for all industry participants' scenarios. For example, on the supply end, targeting chassis, sheet metal and other factories or integrators, it conducts channel distribution and market penetration while matching downstream quality and volume customers.

On the distribution end, for large-scale wholesalers, dealers, and cross-brand alliances in the market, Baturu helps them build private domain platforms.

On the demand end, Baturu's parts centralized procurement digital solution helps enterprises with parts centralized procurement management needs reduce costs by over 10%.

"It can be said that we have created many firsts in the industry, such as automated trading, and we are leading in the industry," Zeng Wangui said.

According to data from China Research Network, China's automotive aftermarket industry scale has exceeded 1.3 trillion yuan, and it is estimated that by 2025, the market scale of automotive maintenance and repair services will reach 1.7 trillion yuan.

Meanwhile, this year, the automotive market structure has changed, with new energy vehicle penetration rates continuously rising. However, Zeng Wangui believes that the arrival of the new energy vehicle era is actually beneficial, "although the parts of new energy vehicles may change, the need for automotive maintenance and repair remains unchanged, the pursuit of sales and costs remains unchanged, and the logic of supply chain services remains unchanged. With the increase in vehicle ownership and average vehicle age, the aftermarket remains a long-slope, thick-snow large track.

In the past, internet enterprises and insurance enterprises have also crossed over into the automotive aftermarket track, but after waves of price wars and value wars, very few are still at the table now."

Baturu, relying on its insights into the market and customers as well as improved organizational capabilities, has maintained a place in the industry.

Facing the future automotive aftermarket, Zeng Wangui believes that efficiency and service quality have become the key to competing in the market. In the future, Baturu's goal is very clear: to persist in being an open digital infrastructure platform, helping industry partners achieve long-term business success; internally, to persist in putting efficiency first and profitability first, building an efficient organization and a profitable industrial internet business model.

Zeng Wangui stated, "The standard for evaluating Baturu is also very simple and clear—truly good service is the real good."

Over ten years, Zeng Wangui has witnessed the development of the automotive aftermarket: "When someone exits, someone will enter. Sometimes when people do things, it's like this. I don't really care what others are saying; I care more about what they are doing. The market will always maintain a state of balance. Be a friend of time."