咖啡店背后的“巨人”：从制造到智造的“番禺样本”

Regarding the matter of districts and counties

An interesting phenomenon is that Chinese people have consumed most of the world's coffee, but still cannot produce world-class coffee machines.

However, when we shift our focus from coffee beans to coffee machines, we discover something even more interesting. China is already the world's largest producer of coffee machines, with at least 8 out of every 10 coffee machines sold globally labeled as "Made in China".

From portable small appliances priced at a few hundred yuan to high-end semi-automatic models, domestic brands are rewriting the script of the "country without coffee beans" with high cost-effectiveness and intelligent innovation. In the Greater Bay Area, a clear division of labor has already been formed in the coffee machine industry chain with strong manufacturing capabilities.

Panyu is a well-known modern intelligent manufacturing zone, and now it has also taken a differentiated route in the coffee machine industry, shifting from "product output" to "solution output", and from "following" to "leading".

The story here is not as simple as a cold and icy machine.

Not just manufacturing, but empowering

If Shunde is the representative of large-scale OEM of household coffee machines, then Panyu firmly occupies the high ground of the commercial market. This cornerstone is supported by Taisho Coffee, which has been rooted in Panyu for more than 20 years.

In the 1990s, the domestic coffee market was still in its infancy. Pan Haiye, the founder of Taisho Coffee, entered the industry by chance with a siphon pot, relying on imported equipment and coffee bean trade to complete the initial accumulation.

After several years of deep cultivation in the industry, she found that simply acting as an agent for overseas brands ultimately had an industry bottleneck that was difficult to break through: without independent core technology, she could only be controlled by others for a long time. So in 2003, she resolutely transformed and devoted herself to independent research and development of coffee machines.

At the beginning of its establishment, there was a shortage of domestic supporting and R&D talents. She and her team worked in reverse to tackle the problem and worked hard to customize a small number of core components. Even if small batch orders were raised by manufacturers, they continued to invest. It took two years to polish the first domestically produced semi-automatic commercial coffee machine, which was officially launched into the market after being tested and optimized in offline stores.

Different from the shallow business model of only selling single machines in the industry, Dazheng Coffee has established an integrated closed loop of research and development, whole machine manufacturing, raw material supply, national after-sales service, and store operation training. With more than 4000 after-sales outlets radiating across the country, it has become the "giant" behind 200000 tea and coffee stores.

In response to the current trend of opening composite stores for coffee and tea drinks, Taisho has opened up a new path: synchronously supplying a complete set of water bar appliances including coffee machines, ice makers, fructose machines, and refrigeration equipment. This one-stop supporting capability is a differentiation advantage that Shunde Industrial Belt, which specializes in mass production of household appliances, does not possess. It also makes Dazheng Coffee an indispensable partner behind chain tea drinks and coffee brands.

Unlike the "all-around athlete" Taisho, another force in Panyu - Kuku Intelligence, points towards a more futuristic "intelligent" track.

In 2016, the domestic beverage robot market was almost blank, with the first generation of intelligent devices costing millions of yuan. The high cost made it difficult for such devices to be widely implemented. After taking root in the supply chain ecosystem in Panyu, Kuku Intelligent gradually completed the localization of the entire process of the machine, directly compressing the equipment price to the 100000 yuan range and significantly reducing the threshold for the sinking market.

From a hardware perspective, a single intelligent robot integrates more than 400 non-standard parts, and a six axis collaborative robotic arm can fully replicate the barista's complete set of operations, including cup picking, grinding, extraction, and 3D customized latte art, in just 60 seconds. With a footprint of only 1.3 square meters, the AI coffee robot can achieve all-weather unmanned operation;

From a software perspective, enterprises are breaking away from a single hardware sales mindset and shifting towards full cycle operational services. They have specifically formed teams to design differentiated pricing and product portfolio solutions for different offline scenarios such as office buildings, parks, and airports. They have also developed their own SaaS backend to achieve remote synchronization of equipment formulas and patterns, creating a digital intelligent store management system.

In addition to the two representative enterprises, the Panyu coffee machine industry has formed a gradient matrix of small and medium-sized enterprises, filling the gap in industry segmentation. Kasilano in the Shiqi area is one of the earliest commercial coffee machine manufacturers in China, specializing in mid to high end semi-automatic models; Hanweitai focuses on OEM export of coffee machines and small household appliances, with an annual sales revenue of nearly one billion yuan; Small and medium-sized manufacturers such as Taika, Lanqiya, and Shawan Xinfeng Machinery Factory cover sub categories such as bean grinders, coffee roasters, hand washing equipment, and snow melting machines.

From the "big brother" serving traditional stores to the "new species" defining future retail, enterprises in Panyu collectively form a rich "coffee equipment universe".

25 kilometer ecological circle: the "invisible moat" of Panyu

Why do companies choose Panyu? If the advantage is attributed to a single factory technology, it is obviously too one-sided. In fact, the answer is hidden in the number "25 kilometers" in Panyu.

Efficient and flexible localized supply chain is the underlying foundation for continuous iteration of Panyu Intelligent Manufacturing. The demand for equipment in offline tea and coffee shops is fragmented, and chain brands generally have the need for exclusive models and customized non-standard water bar equipment. Standardized and large-scale production lines are difficult to adapt to such personalized and differentiated orders.

For Panyu, even without the large-scale OEM capability of Shunde, it can still rely on the collaborative ability of factories in the entire Pearl River Delta world to find a path of "service and efficiency".

Relying on the Pearl River Delta linkage supporting network, from robotic arms in Shenzhen to motors in Dongguan, from hardware in Foshan to local sheet metal in Panyu, a robot requires hundreds of non-standard components, all of which can be fully equipped within 25 kilometers in Panyu. Sample debugging and equipment troubleshooting can be completed within 24 hours, significantly reducing the time and capital costs for enterprise R&D trial and error.

For commercial equipment and intelligent hardware enterprises that need to respond quickly to the market and iterate products frequently, Panyu's ecosystem is an irreplaceable "hardware accelerator".

Most industrial parks in other regions are suitable for standardized mass production of complete machines, and small batch customized orders have long lead times and high premiums. Kuku Intelligent once attempted to build factories in different locations, but ultimately relocated to Panyu due to insufficient supporting efficiency, resulting in a significant improvement in production iteration efficiency.

The hardware and precision machining industry foundation that Panyu has accumulated for decades allows small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises to invest in new product research and development with light assets without the need to build a complete set of component production lines, continuously enriching the product supply of the entire industry. This also explains the fundamental reason why coffee machine manufacturing companies in Panyu do not pursue a large and comprehensive approach, but focus on niche fields and specialize in precision.

In addition to manufacturing, the scarce offline commercial circulation channels across the country firmly lock in Panyu's discourse power in the B-end commercial market. Luopu Street Xinji Shaxi Hotel Supplies Expo City is the largest coffee utensil distribution center in China, with 90% of domestic small and medium-sized coffee shop equipment sources distributed outward from here. The huge demand for offline procurement has attracted manufacturing enterprises to land in reverse, and the two major areas of Dashi and Shiqi have continuously gathered many coffee equipment production factories. Producing and selling in the same location eliminates the need for multiple layers of intermediaries, effectively reducing store procurement costs. This has also led to a continued shift in the domestic offline tea and coffee store equipment procurement market towards Panyu.

More importantly, the soil in Panyu not only provides parts and markets, but also offers "nanny style" business services. From government leadership leading the platform to transport goods and assist in financing, to opening up parks, airports and other scenarios for enterprises to test, a benign ecology of "government stepping on the stage and enterprises singing the opera" has been formed between government and enterprises.

This comprehensive support from supply chain, distribution chain to service chain has transformed Panyu from a manufacturing base to an intelligent manufacturing highland.

Although it does not support the large-scale coffee machine industry, it has built a complete ecosystem that enables efficient flow and collaborative evolution of various factors. In this sense, Panyu has already formed its core competitiveness. The answer to whether Panyu can lead the national coffee equipment race in the future lies in the continuous evolution of this ecosystem.