Interview with Edouard Duval- CEO of East Meets West Fine Wines
Date£º
2019-01-18 10:08 Source£º
www.winechina.com Author:
Jim Sun Translator:
Ivy
Year 2018 is definitely a milestone for East Meets West Fine Wines (EMW) when it held its 15th Anniversary Celebrations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu & Hong Kong. In the fifteen years, EMW has persisted its goal of sharing and exchanging its passion, knowledge and wine culture with wine lovers all over China and also promote Chinese wines to the rest of the world. To discover the remarkable stories behind this outstanding wine company, Chef Editor of Wine China Online Jim Sun had an exclusive interview with CEO Edouard Duval, revealing his overviews on the Chinese wine market and his extraordinary experience during the fifteen years.
Edouard Duval
Jim Sun:Nice to meet you Edouard. Congratulations on your 15th Anniversary! Could you give us a brief introduction about EMW? For example, your business scale & scope, your portfolio, etc.
Edouard Duval:Thank you, Sun!
EMW was founded in 2003 with its head office based in Shanghai. Our company name ¡°East Meets West Fine Wines¡± reflects its goal to share and exchange its passion, knowledge and wine culture with wine lovers all over China.
Now we have 7 branch offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hongkong and Macao, and established 15 representative offices nationwide, making us one of the few national importers and distributors who can cover mainland China, HK & Macau. We distribute to all channels including on-trade (hotels & restaurants), direct sales, namely private clients, off-trade (supermarkets & online shop), as well as wholesalers. We have a very dense network with over 100 wholesalers covering around 150 cities across the nation. We exclusively distribute more than 750 labels of 84 wineries, who are very prominent from renowned regions of the most important 15 wine countries.
East Meets West Fine Wines
Jim Sun:As far as I know, you have started to learn Chinese during your study of MSc at OVI during 2003-2004. Then you came to Shanghai. What attracted you so much about China? How did you start your wine business in the Chinese market?
Edouard Duval:My first time to Shanghai was in 2001, coming to visit my best friend and now my business partner, Gregory Bielot , who was an exchange student in Tongji University at that time. I fell in love with this city and China soon. Then I came back Shanghai in 2003 to finish my study at OIV. During that visit, I got a strong will to work in the wine industry in China. So, with Gregory, we decided to start our business here. We then join in the core team of EMW and manage to purchase the major share of the company, and then begin to develop.
Jim Sun:15-year sounds like quite a long time for a company. Could you introduce us the development of EMW during the 15 years? Any important period or crucial moment you would like to share?
Edouard Duval:15-year is actually a very great achievement in China for any industry, especially for wine market. There are very few wine companies established for such a long time still maintain the same company structure and stable team. When we bought the company in 2006, we had only 3 people. But now we have developed 7 branches and 15 representative offices with over 200 professional employees. There had been a lot of challenges to develop a company that fast and big. But we managed to do so with our persistence.
The opening of our Hong Kong Office was a big challenge as Hong Kong is a very crowded and competitive market and nobody was waiting for us to open there. It made a lot of sense for us in order to have consistency in branding for Greater China as well as to use our network to fully develop the sales. Gregory moved to HK with his family to accomplish this mission and after two years of heavy investment our branch office was profitable and he had now assembled a very strong team and great distribution network. So, it was a very challenging project but now is a great achievement as well as great potential of growth for our company.
Now we are one of the leading wine importers and distributors in China with high professionalism. We have also achieved our 8th ¡°Best Importer¡± award (by WINE100) during our 15th Anniversary celebration. 15th year is definitely a remarkable milestone for EMW.
Gregory Bielot with Edouard Duval
Jim Sun:As a wine importer, how do you learn about and get familiar with the Chinese market with a core team consisting of foreign faces?
Edouard Duval:We have less than 10 people among our 200 employees are foreigners and they mainly based in big cities to take care of on-trade channel, because most of the general managers or directors of F&B channel are still foreigners. Others are brand managers representing the culture and the wine traditions from their countries. Most of them do speak Chinese and it is very important in my eyes in order to communicate well, understand well the market.
Our company and our team have a long history in the Chinese market so they get a lot of insights and that helps us to stay close to the market. We also keep collecting feedbacks from our partners. All of our core management teams have been working for at least 10 years in the Chinese market, so that offers us a very deep understanding of the market.
Jim Sun:What features EMW in terms of business strategy and product selection? What are the key points that helped EMW develop in a healthy way in such a competitive market?
Edouard Duval:First thing is to have a clear vision of what we want to do and to communicate with our suppliers and partners. We do communicate a lot during the cooperation to make sure they have an idea on what is going on in this market and what we truly want, and hence to support us doing so. This is also the key to have strong and stable co-work with our partners.
Secondly, we also have good communication and clear guideline within the team, which enable us to have a stable and loyal crew to work with. It also helps us to execute our goals in a precise and brilliant way.
Duval-Leroy Champagne Dinner In Shenzhen
Jim Sun:Could you share with us your thoughts on the Chinese wine market considering different channels such as fine dining, group purchasing and retail platforms.
Edouard Duval:The market has definitely changed a lot in the past 15 years, even for our own distribution. Our main distribution channel at the very beginning was mainly on-trade, occupying 90% of our sales, and now it accounts for 50% or less, with our development of new direct sales, off trade, online and wholesales. We think it is very important to bring our products to all physical channels in order to build up the brand image.
We also see great development of hospitality industry during the last 15 years, which has also been agreed by our team where to promote our wines. And last year, we started our own online platform.
However, online purchasing also brings plenty of challenges to the market. We see more and more OEM brand spoiling its image or doing fake products, damaging the wine industry. Sometimes the flash-sales disturbing the pricing strategy and hence collapse the wine value in the mind of Chinese consumers. Therefore, we think it is really important to make sure our clients get true product in very good condition directly from the winery with fair price.
Jim Sun:As far as we know, EMW exports the most Chinese wine products among all wine distributors. I can still remember the time we spent together during our visit to Shan Dong & Ning Xia. Could you talk about your intention of doing such business? How do you choose Chinese wines? Do they really bring you margin?
Edouard Duval:It has been a project since the very beginning when I came to China because Chinese wines have a really strong place sitting in the market. I really want to represent, from the very start, the best wines from its regions. And we are very glad that now we have two very best producers cooperating with us - Legacy Peak from Ningxia and Skyline from Xinjiang. They are really great partners with great wines. We have a long history with Legacy Peak as we started from scratch with the family-owned vineyard and it is a really important tour for us in terms of education and promoting the wines, especially quality wines, in China and abroad.
Doing so requires a lot of investment, especially in communication, events and education for market outside China. Now we have very good performance not only in territories like Hong Kong, Macau but also in Singapore and Malaysia.
Jim Sun:You mentioned that EMW will start a new 15-year plan. Could you tell us a little bit about your projects and targets in the future?
Edouard Duval:15- year is a great achievement in China. But we feel still as a young company, with a strong team with great dynamic and entrepreneur mind-set. We want to continue grow and develop further in the wine market, to continue to be an opinion leader and market leader. We have a lot of new projects to carry out for the coming years. That includes new products in our portfolio which are spirits as well as other wines and services related to wine industry.
To continue the development of our digitalization both for branding and e-commerce strategy as well as new tools for our sales team. Last but not least, to continue to expand our distribution scale to 3/4 tier cities in China.