Chinese retail group Suning will bring its unmanned, automated Biu store to CES 2018 in Las Vegas. The company announced the plan from Nanjing on January 5, 2018. Suning ranks second among China’s top non-state-owned enterprises, and it owns a Fortune Global 500 retailer.
CES runs from January 9 to 12, 2018, and it is where many new consumer electronics first appear. Suning’s booth is number 21048 in LVCC South 1. It will show the newest piece of the Smart Retail program, which is spreading fast across China. The trip also comes as the company gets ready to expand overseas.
Joshua Xiang is Executive Vice President of R&D at Suning Commerce Group. He also runs Suning Global Research. He said the Biu concept shows off the latest in the group’s online-to-offline, or O2O, retail strategy. The aim is a one-stop shopping experience, and the team was excited to bring it to Las Vegas, he said.
How it works
The store runs on big data, facial recognition and radio frequency identification, or RFID. Suning opened its first self-service store in Nanjing in August 2017. Since then, four more cashier-less stores have opened in Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing and Xuzhou. The company says they have been a big hit with shoppers.
Tech-savvy Chinese customers come to the Biu stores for gadgets, personal electronics, consumer goods and sports accessories. They can also buy merchandise from famous football clubs. One of them is the Italian Serie A side F.C. Internazionale Milano, which Suning owns.
Entry is handled by a camera. A shopper first links a bank card to the Suning Finance app. After that, the system recognizes the face at the door and lets the person in. Inside, a big-data shopping guide called Suning Smart Recommendation helps people decide what to buy. Because of RFID, customers simply carry items along the payment path. As a result, checkout takes 15 seconds or less, which beats most current self-service formats.
More on show
Suning will also present e-commerce services and tech products aimed at a better shopping experience. They include the following.
- Smart Sue, a shopping assistant that responds to voice and text.
- Anywhere AR, which lets shoppers place virtual products into a real scene.
- Suning Smart Home, an Internet of Things system for home appliances and building functions.
- Smart retail chain solutions.
- The company’s own logistics and shopping finance services.
A forum titled Created in China will take place on Wednesday, January 10, 2018. Suning will host it with the China Household Electric Appliance Research Institute. The session will look at electronics trends in China. It will also share what Suning has learned from Smart Retail.
Suning was founded in 1990 and is the largest omni-channel retailer in China. Its net profit rose 321.23 percent year on year over the first three quarters of 2017. The company credits that jump to its O2O strategy. It runs more than 1,500 technology-driven stores among nearly 4,000 physical locations in over 600 cities. By the end of 2018 it plans to add another 5,000 stores, all tied to its online business. Besides retail, the group works in real estate, financial services, media and entertainment, sports and investment.
