Material Handling

Wumart (CN)

Retail meets logistics: how Wumart and Wanzl are taking the Chinese market by storm

Xu Shaochuan calls it a win-win situation when he talks about the partnership with Wanzl. He is the Chief Operating Officer of Wumart, one of the largest national retail chains in China. Wumart has partnered with Wanzl since 2011. The collaboration started with shopping trolleys and Wanzl now supplies roll cages for e-commerce logistics. China favours the omnichannel retail strategy: a trend that is now setting global standards for retail of the future. Sales channels are becoming increasingly interlinked, online with offline, digital with analogue, virtual with local – everything is feasible and everything is possible. However, good marketplaces in the real world do not simply disappear, but reinvent themselves over and over again. Just like Wumart, the portfolio includes supermarkets, convenience stores and hypermarkets. This is where people go shopping – on the weekends the “Morning Market” is a hive of activity early in the morning. Beijingers like to talk about their “vegetable basket” or their “rice sack”, when they talk about Wumart. Wumart is, after all, part of daily life in Beijing – just like the breakfast rice porridge called Zhou.

Beijingers can now have the rice for their Zhou delivered to their doorstep, as well as many other food and non-food items. What it takes is a functioning 24-hour supply chain, which rolls on with 800 RC/N100 cages from Wanzl. Ordered online, all “every day” customer orders go to Wumart’s central warehouse for night pick-up and distribution. The goods are picked here and delivered to the Wumart stores overnight. Ever since Wanzl’s roll cages have been in use, Wumart’s warehouse has been running smoothly in terms of costs, speed and efficiency. Alternatively, there are “Day up to” orders: these online orders arrive directly at the nearest Wumart store where the goods are picked and delivered immediately.

Wanzl has also been rolling in Wumart’s bricks-and-mortar stores for many years. Several shopping trolley models with basket volumes of 88 to 125 litres accompany customers on their visit to the store. The small, manoeuvrable Convenience Cart CT33 is a secondary model suited to smaller shopping trips for fresh goods. Transport trolleys from Wanzl support the staff in every Wumart store when it comes to quickly restocking shelves. Every year, around 10,000 brand-new trolleys roll off Wanzl’s production line and are delivered to Wumart. When the store in Dacheng was opened in 2014, Wanzl’s delivery to China also included 10,000 coin deposit systems for the trolleys for the first time.

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Wumart and Wanzl

The cooperation between the two companies started in 2011. COO Xu Shaochuan and a Wumart delegation visited Wanzl’s trade fair stand at EuroShop for the first time. He and his delegation were impressed by what the trolleys from Wanzl offered in terms of design, quality and practicality

We need a strong supplier to meet all the needs of the store. We therefore apply very high standards when selecting our suppliers. Wanzl is one of our long-standing partners in the strategic cooperation for today and tomorrow.
XU SHAOCHUAN, Chief Operating Officer Wumart