Aiming at the pain points of the trillion - dollar inventory market, Weihuotong explores a new path for intelligent tail - goods trading through data modeling.
36Kr learned that the world's first intelligent trading platform for surplus goods, "Weihuotong", recently announced the launch of its first-round financing. The funds from this round will mainly be used for the construction of offline warehousing systems, the establishment of an algorithm team, and the improvement of supply chain capabilities. The company has not previously disclosed the specific amount of the financing. The Weihuotong project, founded in Guangzhou, positions itself as an intelligent trading service provider for surplus goods. Its main business covers all categories, including the precise matching and accelerated circulation of overstocked inventories of daily necessities and other categories. The platform constructs a dynamic product ranking model by connecting customs export goods data with suppliers' real-time inventory data, helping merchants quickly clear their surplus goods inventory. Its core ability lies in the prediction of seasonal consumption patterns. For example, it promotes schoolbags and school uniforms before the start of the school term and increases the display priority of down jackets before winter. Although the technical path is not yet clear, the company has launched a plan to establish a data algorithm team.
The surplus goods trading market has long faced pain points such as mismatched supply and demand information and low circulation efficiency. According to estimates by a third-party research institution, the market scale of overstocked goods in China exceeds one trillion yuan. However, the traditional trading model relies on offline matchmaking, and the turnover cycle of unsalable categories generally exceeds 12 months. In the industry competition pattern, comprehensive second-hand trading platforms have an advantage in traffic, while there are also decentralized business forms where regional wholesalers control the supply of goods. Weihuotong chooses to focus on the intelligent matching scenario. It obtains the flow patterns of goods through customs data and designs dynamic ranking rules based on merchants' real-time inventory levels, attempting to establish a differentiated advantage in terms of the accuracy of traffic distribution.
The company has not disclosed its past financing history. The current major challenge lies in the construction of the ability to process massive amounts of data. It is necessary to simultaneously solve the problems of the stability of data acquisition channels and information security protection. The team has planned to strengthen the security of technical cooperation through signing confidentiality agreements and implementing an equity incentive mechanism. The selection criteria for cooperation partners focus on the practical experience of candidate institutions in the field of trade data processing, especially successful cases of seasonal consumption prediction models.
The founder team emphasized in a public interview that "the in-depth exploration of data value is the key for the platform to break through." The construction path of its data system is divided into three steps: the precipitation of basic trade data, the modeling of multi-dimensional variable relationships, and the generation of dynamic ranking rules. The head of an industrial fund said, "The surplus goods market has strong periodic fluctuations. Using data models to solidify these implicit business logics can release the circulation efficiency of hundreds of billions of levels of stock resources."
As global supply chain fluctuations intensify, the increasing inventory pressure at the factory end and the demand for flexibility in product selection at the retail end form a dual driving force. Weihuotong attempts to shift the traditional inventory turnover model that relies on experience to data-driven decision-making by establishing intelligent trading rules. This operating mechanism that combines fixed-cycle rules with real-time variable adjustments may open up new value space for players in the vertical track.
Meanwhile, the founder disclosed that the platform will also launch financial services. For suppliers in urgent need of capital turnover, the platform will offer a service where they can receive payment before delivering the goods, helping enterprises solve their capital problems with the highest efficiency. This will solve the two major problems of "overstocked goods" and "difficulty in capital turnover" for most enterprises.
The platform efficiently connects light manufacturing enterprises, brand owners, and downstream purchasers, solves the problem of surplus goods backlog, revitalizes idle assets, improves the efficiency of the industrial chain, and promotes the circular economy.