In June of this year, Carsten Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline, said frustratingly in front of the media that Lufthansa lost 1 million euros per hour during the epidemic, and 26,000 positions were changed. "Redundancy" is planning to lay off employees and file for bankruptcy.
A crying child will never have bad luck. The German government immediately injected 6 billion euros into Lufthansa and returned a 3 billion loan.
Lufthansa has temporarily escaped, but in China, thousands of miles away, a company called Sturgeon Technology is anxious like an ant on a hot pot. Before it was hit hard by the epidemic, one of Lufthansa's signatures was to allow first-class passengers to eat unlimited caviar for free, so it was also ridiculed that it would "pay back for a meal." The company that supplies caviar to Lufthansa is Sturgeon Technology, located on the shore of Hangzhou Qiandao Lake.
Sturgeon Technology is the world's largest caviar manufacturer, with a market share of 35%. More than 90% of its products are sold to Europe and the United States, with a price of 20,000 yuan/kg, which is called "European Moutai".
However, this caviar giant has failed to hit the A-share listing three times in the past eight years. Without the financing ability brought by the capital market, this year's epidemic has even more appeared to be a rainy night, Lufthansa suspended flights, European and American restaurants closed, and sales were interrupted. The income of
has fallen sharply, but the investment in fish farming cannot be small at all. The struggling Sturgeon Technology had to publicly auction its shares on the property rights network. The 9.32% stake was valued at only 63 million, which is equivalent to the company's valuation of less than 700 million.
, the company that produces "European Moutai", is hanging by a thread.
Not all caviar is called caviar.
caviar refers specifically to sturgeon roe that has been marinated with salt. It belongs to the top ingredients in Western cuisine. It is also called the three major European and American cuisines along with foie gras and truffles. It has been formed in European and American countries and some Asian countries with nearly 500 With a year-old stable market, chefs have also developed a variety of luxurious dishes around caviar.
In the beginning, the main source of caviar was wild caught sturgeon. Large-scale commercial fishing reached its peak in the 20th century. From 1950 to 1990, the world's wild sturgeon catch was maintained at more than 15,000 tons per year. In 1977, it even reached a historical peak of 31,800 tons of annual catch and 1988 tons of wild caviar.
However, the consequences of exhausting fishing and water pollution came in an instant, and the number of wild sturgeon dropped sharply. In 1997, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) included all existing sturgeons in the world in the protected list, and issued licenses and annual quotas to countries around the world to control production and export. Under the
quota restrictions, wild sturgeon catches and wild caviar production have declined rapidly. In 2013, wild sturgeon catches have fallen to less than 500 tons, and wild caviar production has also dropped to about 9.41 tons, only 0.5% of the 1977 level.
At the same time, the artificial breeding of sturgeon has emerged and has gradually become the main market supply force. In 2000, the production of sturgeon farming surpassed the production of wild fish for the first time; in 2007, the production of artificially farmed caviar exceeded the production of wild caviar for the first time. Since 2011, 99% of the global sturgeon has been cultivated artificially.
But artificial breeding and product production is not an easy task. Sturgeons are sub-cold water. The suitable water temperature is 0-28℃. If the water temperature exceeds 28℃, the immunity of the fish will decrease, and it will be prone to disease or even death. Therefore, how to protect the sturgeon from the heat in summer is a major technical problem. In addition, the maturation cycle of sturgeon is as long as 7-15 years, and the breeding process requires a lot of capital investment.
After the female fish matures, the worker needs to take a quick lethal method of killing the fish to obtain the eggs before the eggs mature. The egg retrieval step alone requires two workers to complete, one specializes in dissecting the fish maw without touching the roe with hands, and the other is responsible for taking the roe from the fish maw.
Pickling after taking out the roe is even more delicate. Different species of sturgeon have a difference in roe diameter of a few tenths of a millimeter, and the required pickling time varies. If the salt is not fully cured and the contact between the salt and the roe is not even enough, the salt cannot be fully absorbed by the roe, and the flavor of the roe will not be pickled; otherwise, the roe will break and lose its elasticity.
After being made, caviar still needs to be refrigerated to keep fresh. At a temperature of minus 2-4°C, the finished caviar can be stored for 18 months, while it can only be stored for 6-8 weeks in a normal refrigerator. The long growth cycle, complex breeding requirements, and cumbersome production steps of
make the production of artificially cultivated caviar seriously unable to keep up with demand. At present, the global annual output of caviar is only about two to three hundred tons, and the supply and demand gap is nearly 900 tons. The price of caviar has risen accordingly. The average export price in 2008 once reached US$726.62/kg, an increase of 200% over 2000. "Black Gold".
caviar is severely in short supply and the high price has caused two characteristics of sturgeon farming-
(1) gross profit margin of 70%, net profit margin of 30%, which is more than three times that of common higher-end aquatic products such as sea cucumbers;
(2) Caviar makes a lot of money, but fish sells at a loss. Caviar is sold to high-end European and American restaurants and airlines, and the more expensive it is, the better; fish is consumed locally and enters supermarkets and local restaurants. The sales channels and pricing of the two products are completely different.
Generally speaking, the artificial development of sturgeon and caviar are characterized by a long cycle, cumbersome technology, and large initial investment. Even if the profit is high, it is impossible to achieve large-scale production in the short term.
But no matter how difficult the technology is, how can it stop the industrious and brave Chinese people?
In 1998, Wang Bin, the youngest director-level cadre of the Ministry of Agriculture of China, suddenly chose to resign.
sturgeon from wild to artificial breeding is equivalent to a thorough reshuffle of the original industry structure. The gap between supply and demand allowed domestic sturgeon to sell for more than 200 yuan per catty at that time, and even a catty for thousands of dollars in high-end restaurants.
Wang Bin saw a business opportunity and immediately used all his savings of more than 200,000 yuan to raise 5,000 sturgeons in Fangshan District, Beijing. One year later, each sturgeon has grown to about 2 catties and can be sold. But at this time, due to the rapid increase in the number of domestic farmers, the price of sturgeon meat plummeted to 20 yuan a catty. Faced with such a dilemma, many people are watching what Wang Bin wants to do.
can be the youngest director-level cadre of the Ministry of Agriculture, of course he has no common knowledge with others. Wang Bin feels that selling fish meat is "trading back the pearls" and selling caviar is the right way. In order to implement the strategy of "only raising, not selling", he found investment through his original working relationship at the Fisheries Science Research Institute, and then moved the farm from Beijing to Qiandao Lake with better water quality.
But there are still three mountains waiting for him: summer heat, sex identification, sales channels. In the first summer of
in Qiandao Lake, this business was almost wiped out. In 2003, Qiandao Lake experienced the hottest summer in 60 years. One morning, Wang Bin found a dead fish when he came to the breeding pond to feed the fish. He didn't care too much at the time, but what happened afterwards made him panic. "From the beginning, the fish died, and then they fished and buried them for three months." Half of the 50,000 sturgeons died; technical backbones could not resist the pressure and resigned.
Wang Bin, who was extremely depressed, and the seven or eight employees who stayed, took more than 20 bottles of liquor to the lake to get drunk. After waking up the next day, the employees were going to continue fishing for dead fish. At this time, Wang Bin suddenly announced that he had thought of a way to solve the heat death of sturgeon. He wanted to pump the cold water of Qiandao Lake below 20 meters. Come up to raise fish. The employees of
don't know if the boss is sober, anyway, they pump the low temperature water up. In the midst of doubting, the sturgeon actually survived. Not long after
, a neglected issue came before Wang Bin. What caviar wants is the unfertilized eggs of female fish. The male fish is not only useless but also takes up space. It needs to be sold in advance for money to support the continued breeding of female fish. The problem is that the sturgeon cannot be separated from the male and the female until the age of 3, and because the appearance is almost the same, the abdomen opening is required for identification. In order to solve this problem, Wang Bin invited experts from Hungary to fish up tens of thousands of sturgeons one by one to identify and distinguish between male and female.
After the summer heat escape and sex identification are done, how to sell the roe is a bigger problem. The main consumption places of caviar are high-end restaurants in Europe, America and Japan, airline first-class cabins, and luxury cruise ships. From 2006 to 2011, European, American and Japanese caviar imports totaled about 656 tons, accounting for 84% of the total global imports.
Why should the rich in Europe, America and Japan accept the caviar produced in China?
In 2006, after producing the first batch of caviar, Wang Bin took 400 kilograms of samples to France and found the chairman of the World Caviar Association. The chairman of the association is from Russia, and his family has been in the caviar business for three generations. There are always three or four tons of caviar piled in the cold storage at home, and the taster is with him. After tasting Wang Bin's sample, the chairman of the association did not even buy 1 gram.
In 2011, Lufthansa's original Italian caviar supplier was out of stock. Earlier, Wang Bin encountered a Lufthansa employee purchasing ingredients at the Belgian International Aquatic Products Exhibition. He asked the other party to taste his own caviar. The Lufthansa employees were afraid to eat it because of food safety issues. This time there was a change of supplier, and Wang Bin decided to visit him.
At Lufthansa's German headquarters, Wang Bin gave a comprehensive introduction to the product. Lufthansa's board of directors was very moved after hearing it, and then refused to taste it again.
Soon after, Lufthansa decided to open tender for caviar suppliers and organize a global blind evaluation test. In the evaluation session of the taster, Sturgeon's "Kaluga" caviar defeated more than 20 products produced in Russia, France and Iran and ranked first. However, Lufthansa still did not use Sturgeon Technology's products, and conducted a second round of blind testing six months later, allowing first-class passengers to taste it. This time, Sturgeon Technology took the first place.
Finally, the "Kaluga" caviar produced in China entered one of Lufthansa's stations and increased to 3 stations in the following year until it became the exclusive supplier of caviar for all Lufthansa stations.
won the Lufthansa first-class ticket, which is of great significance. The products of Sturgeon Technology quickly opened up the European market, and 22 of the 27 Michelin three-star restaurants in Paris used their caviar. In 2019, Sturgeon Technology produced 102 tons of caviar, accounting for 35% of the global market share. The company's performance has also continued to grow. From 2009, its revenue was 35.57 million yuan, to 237 million yuan in 2019, and its net profit was 78 million yuan.
However, this Chinese company, which broke the European and American caviar monopoly, suffered in the domestic capital market more difficult than the process of winning the Lufthansa order.
In January 2018, the listing application of Sturgeon Technology was rejected again. This is already Sturgeon’s third IPO failure.
In 2012, Sturgeon Technology submitted its prospectus for the first time and applied for listing on the GEM. However, this application was rejected by the issuing agency because of "significant reliance on related parties."
It turned out that the company's shareholder Zixing Liangmei made a surprise purchase in December 2010, and in order to avoid the 5% ratio, the shareholding ratio was made 4.99%. In addition, from 2010 to 2011, Sturgeon Technology purchased 7-8-year-old female Siberian sturgeon, hybrid sturgeon and Shishi sturgeon from Zixing Liangmei at a purchase price of 36.601 million yuan. After deducting this related transaction, the principal of Sturgeon Technology Operating income and net profit have changed by more than 10%, which has a significant impact on revenue and profit.
In 2014, Sturgeon Technology submitted the prospectus for the second time, but it was rejected again. This time, the shareholder Zixing Liangmei, who rushed to buy shares two years ago, disclosed a fraud scandal, claiming that the breeding inventory on January 9, 2012 was made to cooperate with the listing of Sturgeon Technology and to be subject to inspection by the Securities Regulatory Commission. It is not true data. Under the farce, Sturgeon Technology failed to hit the GEM for the second time.
The unwilling Sturgeon Technology submitted its prospectus for the third time in 2016. This time it finally had no impact on the prosperity of the capital, but Sturgeon Technology was rejected again: Sturgeon Technology’s overseas income accounted for a relatively high proportion, and mainly passed Sales through distribution channels, coupled with the problem of inventory counting and the dispersion of the shareholding structure, many uncertain factors have led to another "Waterloo" of Sturgeon Technology. In addition to the repeated blockade of
listing applications, this year's epidemic also dealt a heavy blow to Sturgeon Technology. Under the epidemic, the catering and transportation industries have been hit hard, and caviar orders in European and American markets have also been cancelled or postponed. The caviar suddenly disappeared, and there was a backlog of three tons of processed caviar products in the warehouse. Under tremendous pressure, Sturgeon Technology turned its attention to the domestic market.
Since May this year, Kaluga caviar has entered the live broadcast rooms of Liu Tao, Lin Yilun and Li Jiaqi one after another, opening up sales through live broadcasts. Kaluga’s first live broadcast sold 1,000 copies of caviar priced at 92 yuan, which is equivalent to the company’s Tmall platform for 4 days.Sales: At the live broadcast of 618 e-commerce promotion, Kaluga sold a large order of 618,000 yuan within 15 minutes.
But this is all in vain. Although it occupies more than 90% of the domestic market share, compared with the international market, the domestic caviar consumption scale is too small. In 2013, Sturgeon Technology’s export revenue accounted for 83% of total revenue, and last year, the domestic market accounted for less than 10% of Sturgeon’s total sales. The reason for
is simple: there is no caviar in Chinese food.
caviar can be used with biscuits, French bread, and more often eaten directly or with champagne. However, none of the cooking methods of Chinese food such as frying, frying, cooking, etc. is suitable for eating caviar. Therefore, domestic caviar consumption is more dependent on foreign guests and a very small number of consumer groups who understand caviar. Sturgeon Technology wants to open the domestic market and increase consumer acceptance, and it needs far more than a few live broadcasts.
black gold is also no match for the black swan. The "European Moutai" made in China has won the world but is losing to the epidemic.
