ChinaTechTrip’s Post

The secret of instant retail can be found deep within the bowels of Beijing. The real innovation in Chinese retail isn't in robots, gimmicks and gadgets but in smart business models. During one of the days of the ChinaTechTrip study tour we zoom in on different forms of instant retail in China. After a morning masterclass explaining various business models, we head into the city to explore them in real life. One of the most successful concepts concerns lightning warehouse. We visited a Xiongben warehouse, deep below the ground in a residential area in Beijing. On first sight it might look like a strange underground supermarket or a dark store of a flash delivery company like Gorillas/Zapp/Getir/Flink. But lightning warehouses are different. They are often run by convenience store entrepreneurs who have moved their businesses to places with cheaper rentals and expanded the number of SKUs they can sell. Unlike many of the failed flash delivery companies in Europe, lightning warehouses do not run their own sites/apps and do not deliver. They cooperate with the likes of Meituan and Eleme that offer digitization and couriers for them and have hundreds of millions of users in their multi-functional platforms. As I explained in a Tech Buzz China report last year, lightning warehouses make the difference between loss-making and profitable instant retail for these entrepreneurs. Xiongben has already expanded to 50 lightning warehouses in Beijing. Meituan plans to expand the 30.000 lightning warehouses it currently works with to 100.000 in 2027, generating more than $25 billion in GMV. You'll be able to learn more about this and many other innovative retail concepts during the ChinaTechTrip tours in 2025. Visit the LinkedIn page for more information.