Can young people's demands for star-chasing and getting social-media-worthy shareable shots sustain this business?

With monthly revenue hitting hundreds of thousands of yuan, are digital device rental merchants really making profits?

Author | Gao Ze

Editor | Xing Yun

At a concert, young people hold telephoto phones aimed at their idols; before a long vacation, mirrorless cameras, CCDs and action cameras are packed into suitcases and heading to scenic spots and music festivals.

For more and more young people, capturing their idols and keeping travel photos does not mean they have to buy expensive equipment first. A telephoto flagship phone rented for two to three hundred yuan per day, a vintage CCD for 50 yuan for three days, or even a pair of AI glasses for a trial experience, are replacing the act of "owning" the devices themselves.

This seemingly easy business does not sell cameras or mobile phones, but the opportunity to take qualified photos within a few days, a photo shared on social platforms, and a consumption choice that avoids bearing the depreciation of equipment. The double holiday of Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, as well as the boom of concerts, performances and tourism, has pushed up orders and attracted more merchants to enter the track.

Is 3C digital imaging equipment rental a good business?

Rent a telephoto camera for 200 yuan a day

In recent years, the 3C digital imaging equipment rental industry has heated up again. Chasing idols at concerts and traveling during holidays are the two most stable consumption scenarios.

The former requires equipment to capture the stage from a long distance under complex lighting, while the latter pays more attention to portability, atmospheric effect and communication performance on social platforms. Rental reduces the one-time use cost, and leaves the idleness and depreciation risk after purchase to the merchants.

Zhou Ang has been engaged in the second-hand camera related industry for many years, and turned to open a store called Nanjing Coconut Camera Rental two or three years ago. When he first started the rental business, the live streaming and short video industries developed rapidly, and professional camera rental accounted for 30%-40% of his business income.

But now the short video and live streaming industries have become saturated, coupled with the substitution of AI, professional camera rental only accounts for about 10% of his business now.

In sharp contrast, ordinary young consumers have become the main force in the rental market, among which young women account for a particularly prominent proportion. Many renters are not professional photography enthusiasts, and their demand for renting equipment is not to complete commercial shooting, but to meet the needs of posting qualified photos on social platforms.

Zhou Ang observed that many girls who come to rent equipment do not pursue top-level camera hardware parameters or "extreme image quality", they pay more attention to the photos that have a natural online viral feel, retro atmosphere, and are suitable for posting on WeChat Moments and Douyin. "High-pixel, extremely professional photos may not necessarily get attention on social platforms, but the photos taken by retro CCDs come with a unique atmospheric effect, which is equivalent to a social password in the social field and makes people look very tasteful."

As a result, the old CCD point-and-shoot cameras born in the 1990s have become a dark horse in the rental market.

These second-hand old devices are not expensive themselves, and the three-day rent is only 50-70 yuan. But the devices are very old, Zhou Ang said that the failure rate of some models can reach 10%-20%, and the maintenance cost including parts and labor is as high as 100 to 200 yuan each time, which brings considerable operation pressure to merchants, but still can not stop the continuous rental demand in travel scenarios.

The concert scenario has spawned another unique set of equipment demands. Most traditional venues restrict large professional cameras from entering, so the rental of telephoto flagship mobile phones has risen rapidly.

Panda has been doing rental business in the Pearl River Delta for many years, focusing on concert mobile phone rental. Business records show that flagship models like vivo X300 Ultra equipped with an external telephoto lens, the whole set of equipment is worth more than 6,000 yuan, and the daily rent is about 200 yuan. For high-end camera kits like Canon R5 with 200-800mm telephoto lens, the whole set of equipment is worth nearly 30,000 yuan, and the maximum daily rent can reach 400 yuan. When it comes to concerts of top idols, renters are willing to accept even higher prices.

The idol-chasing scenario also shows strong community characteristics. Zhou Ang noticed that for concerts of artists under specific brokerage companies, most of the audience are young women around 18 years old with very prominent consumption power. "People around you are renting various telephoto devices to record the wonderful moments of the concert, and you will be driven by this atmosphere, which generates more rental demand."

The strong demand has even spawned new business forms: many practitioners drag a large number of devices to follow the national tour cities, and conduct on-site handover around the concert venues, eliminating the trouble of express delivery back and forth.

From the demand side, this is indeed an attractive business.

Because for many users, the purchased equipment has a low usage rate and has the risk of depreciation, so rental is more cost-effective. Consumers only pay for the right to use for a few days, and merchants turn the equipment into assets that can be rented continuously.

But "easy to rent" does not mean "easy to make profits". The payback period of rent varies greatly between different categories. For popular concert equipment, when there are enough performance sessions, the payback can be realized as fast as half a year. But once the number of performances shrinks, the payback period will be extended. For travel-oriented devices like DJI Pocket series, although the demand is stable during holidays, there are a large number of merchants entering the market, the price competition is extremely fierce, the rent is constantly suppressed, and the general payback period takes two years.

More importantly, equipment depreciation, damage, loss, fraudulent rental and logistics costs will eat up profits beyond the book revenue.

Good-looking data, hard-to-earn profits

In terms of public business revenue data, many rental merchants can achieve a monthly revenue of hundreds of thousands of yuan, but revenue is not equal to profit, and multiple factors are continuously squeezing the actual income.

The rapid depreciation of equipment is the biggest pressure hanging over the heads of rental merchants.

In the entire second-hand equipment market, there is a paradoxical "diseconomies of scale" phenomenon: the larger the inventory scale, the higher the apparent order and rental income, but the higher the risk that equipment depreciation will eat up profits.

Zhou Ang said that in the current second-hand camera market, a 30% annual depreciation is a relatively common phenomenon. "The price drop of equipment in the past six months can be described as extremely severe."

Based on this reality, many merchants choose to control their own equipment inventory at 3 million to 4 million yuan, and refuse chain expansion. Zhou Ang believes that if a single store continues to expand, it will need to increase personnel and operating costs, and spend money on traffic acquisition, which is not cost-effective in general.

The popularization of the no-deposit model has brought another layer of risk.

The equipment is refused to be returned by the renter and sold directly, which is called "order absconding" in the industry. In the current rental market, consumers are generally accustomed to no-deposit services. If merchants insist on charging high deposits, they will easily lose customers directly, but no-deposit means that assets are exposed to risks. And most of the cases where the equipment is not returned after expiration are identified as civil economic disputes, not criminal fraud.

According to Zhou Ang's feedback, even if the lawsuit is won, if the other party has no executable property under their name, the money still can not be recovered. At most, the other party will be listed as a dishonest person subject to execution, but the equipment and economic losses still can not be recovered. To identify the case as criminal fraud requires extremely high evidence collection thresholds, which is difficult to implement.

Under this competitive situation, individual self-employed merchants will "suffer the most". Seeing the hot rental business, they take several high-priced cameras to the platform and follow the trend of no-deposit. Once they encounter malicious order absconding, the whole set of equipment is lost directly, which is enough to severely damage or even directly end their small personal business.

In addition, for various 3C digital devices, especially old products like CCDs, scratches, aging and hidden faults are difficult to quantify and define, and there is no unified standard for damage compensation, which all depends on negotiation between merchants and renters. A few merchants will ask for high compensation for tiny scratches, and a large number of rental warning posts have appeared on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu.

In response to the risks of equipment loss and damage, equipment insurance products for rental merchants have emerged in overseas markets, but this domestic niche track is still in the initial stage, and practitioners are not aware of the existence of related products. In addition, although some large rental platforms have supporting corresponding risk protection schemes, small and medium-sized independent merchants can hardly get protection services suitable for their own situation, and the risks of equipment loss and damage are mostly borne by themselves.

In addition, platform commission and logistics costs further compress profits.

In such a complex risk environment, the surviving small and medium-sized merchants have worked out their own risk hedging methods. Risk control is placed at the top of all work, and practitioners generally do not count on recovering losses through lawsuits after accidents, but focus on intercepting risks in advance.

Panda will refer to the renter's social security and salary flow to judge their compensation ability, and build an internal ledger of fraudster information; a large part of their new customers are introduced by old customers, and acquaintance endorsement is equivalent to indirect guarantee, which reduces the probability of being cheated. Zhou Ang also relies on third-party tools to screen users, and for concert orders, he will require renters to provide concert tickets as auxiliary vouchers.

In addition, keeping video evidence throughout the whole process is a basic operation that both practitioners will adopt. The equipment status of each circulation node is kept as evidence, so that there is an objective basis for subsequent damage disputes.

There are also corresponding strategies in inventory scheduling. Before the peak season comes, Panda will allocate equipment across warehouses to cope with the explosive demand of concerts and holidays; in the off-season, the equipment will be scattered in different tourist cities to avoid all inventory being concentrated in one place, resulting in low rental rate.

Can new categories and new models support the next profitable business?

The involution of the mass category track has entered a white-hot stage. There are a large number of merchants entering the market for ordinary cameras and DJI action cameras, and the price war is constantly compressing profits, so it is difficult to achieve excess growth here. From the perspective of practitioners, opportunities come more from two directions: AI peripheral hardware, and niche segmented categories that focus on emotional value.

As an emerging hardware emerging in recent years, AI glasses have been put on the rental shelves, but the market is still in the trial stage, and the rigid demand scenarios are limited.

Compared with cameras and mobile phones, its customer group is highly concentrated at the age of 18-25, most users hold an experience mentality, and it can also undertake the commercial demand of enterprise exhibitions. AI glasses have a simple hardware structure, no precision and vulnerable parts such as shutter and CMOS photosensitive element, which belongs to the low-loss category, and the maintenance is relatively simple, with a daily rent of only about 40 yuan.

The reality Zhou Ang sees is that the demand in the mass tourism scenario is not strong. At present, the pixel and image quality of AI glasses are still difficult to match with mobile phones, and the shooting ability is not strong. Therefore, part of its orders come from niche scenarios such as speech teleprompters, and even there is a gray demand for students to cheat in exams, and the rigid demand for mass daily travel has not really taken shape.

With the development of large AI models, various AI supporting peripheral hardware are regarded as directions worthy of observation in the future.

Rental business in many cases sells not only the hardware itself, but also emotional value: chasing idols at concerts and taking photos during travel are essentially paying for emotional experience. Following this logic, some niche differentiated categories are beginning to emerge.

Panda has obtained the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau agency of wedding video recorder, and its business scope covers the sales and rental of video recorders across the country. Wedding video recorders were first introduced into the Chinese mainland from Singapore and Hong Kong, China. Guests pick up the video recorder to record blessing videos for the newlyweds, which has opened up rental sales in the wedding planning market in the Pearl River Delta. There are also niche modified shooting equipment for specific scenarios of Japanese tours, the demand volume is not large, but there is real market demand.

At the model level, many localized innovation attempts have also emerged. Some merchants adopt a multi-warehouse model, supporting cross-city, cross-province and even cross-border return in different places in Hong Kong and Macau. Renters can rent in City A and return in another city without sending it back along the original route, which adapts to the cross-city travel schedule and reduces part of the loss of equipment caused by express delivery back and forth.

Many practitioners are still evaluating the equipment hosting model: many consumers buy cameras themselves, but the actual use frequency is very low, and the equipment is idle and depreciated at home for a long time. They can host the equipment to the rental shop for external rental, and the two parties share the income, so as to revitalize a large number of idle digital hardware.

But the new model also has to face practical constraints. The audience of niche categories is limited, the time for large-scale popularization of AI hardware is unknown, and the hosting model also needs to solve a series of problems such as equipment condition judgment and loss responsibility division.

The demand for 3C digital rental is indeed growing, but the industry rules have not kept up. At present, there is no unified standard for equipment condition, damage assessment and compensation, and small and medium-sized merchants are difficult to obtain commercial insurance suitable for rental scenarios. Therefore, the risks are mainly borne by the lessors, while consumers may encounter temporary price increases, damage assessment disputes and hidden charges.

To make "renting instead of buying" a more mature consumption choice, the industry needs not only the next popular equipment, but also more reliable infrastructure: platforms improve performance and dispute handling rules, insurance institutions provide protection products for equipment loss and damage, and relatively transparent equipment inspection, damage assessment and compensation standards are formed between merchants and consumers.

Pre-risk control, evidence available during the process, and guaranteed afterwards, are the prerequisites for digital rental to grow from a holiday boom to a long-term business.

(At the request of the interviewee, Panda is a pseudonym in the text)

This article is from the WeChat official account "Baobian" (ID: baobiannews), author: Gao Ze, released with authorization from 36Kr.