探访巴图鲁曾万贵：完成周期洗礼 汽配“老法师”找到数智化采购新节奏

This article shares the transformation practices and industry insights of BatuLu, a leading player in China's industrial internet for automotive parts, with key takeaways as follows:

1. It outlines the core pain points of China's trillion-scale automotive aftermarket: low parts standardization, long distribution chains, high trust costs, and the fact that internet players have failed to build a fully viable business model despite years of entry into the sector.

2. It traces BatuLu's 10-year transformation journey: Founded in 2013, BatuLu started as a self-operated full-range auto parts trading platform Qipeipu, and has raised nearly RMB 1 billion in total financing. In 2020, it proactively executed a strategic upgrade to become a digital infrastructure platform for automotive parts, shifting to a "SaaS + supply chain management service" model where it does not participate directly in transactions or hold inventory, and generates revenue from service fees for outputting its capabilities. In the past two years, its transaction scale has grown 30% year-over-year, and the health of its business model has improved significantly.

3. It identifies three new major industry directions: becoming a supply chain manager for large domestic B2B clients, leveraging China's supply chain advantages to expand overseas, and building industrial AI and large language models tailored for the aftermarket to streamline repair and transaction processes.

For automotive aftermarket brands, this article summarizes key takeaways aligned with your business needs as follows:

1. Consumer and trend insights: Currently, trust costs for automotive parts products are extremely high. Many consumers have entrenched cognitive inertia: they prefer to pay a premium for original equipment parts rather than try higher cost-quaity qualified matching parts. Building trust mechanisms should be the core priority of brand building.

2. Channel development opportunities: Large B2B clients such as 4S groups and large maintenance chains have strong demand for upgrading their in-house supply chain management. Brands can partner with digital platforms like BatuLu to leverage the platform's aggregated traffic for aggregated group purchasing, gain supply chain pricing advantages, and reduce your own operating costs.

3. New growth market opportunities: The world is in a period of supply chain restructuring, and automotive aftermarket infrastructure is generally underdeveloped in overseas markets. Chinese auto parts supply chains have clear competitive advantages. Brands can join forces to expand overseas via digital platforms, shifting from fragmented exports to integrated, capability-enabled global expansion, and build long-term rooted growth in overseas markets.

For automotive parts sellers, this article summarizes key takeaways including risk warnings and growth opportunities as follows:

1. Risk warning: The traditional asset-heavy self-operated sales model may seem high in gross margin, but it requires advance stocking and pre-positioned warehouses. Once inventory turnover slows, capital costs and inventory depreciation will quickly eat away all profits. This model has low operational health and is difficult to scale long-term, so sellers should guard against this model trap.

2. Domestic transformation opportunities: Large B2B clients such as 4S groups and large maintenance chains currently have clear pain points and demand for supply chain management upgrades. Sellers can transform into asset-light supply chain management service providers, output the standardized and data-driven capabilities you have accumulated, and generate revenue via service fees. This model is more sustainable and offers greater growth room.

3. New growth opportunities: Overseas expansion and AI are both new growth directions. Sellers can join forces on digital platforms to tap into overseas incremental demand, and also leverage AI to empower transaction and service links to expand C-end service opportunities.

For automotive parts manufacturing factories, this article summarizes key takeaways on business opportunities and digital transformation insights as follows:

1. Product and production insights: China's current automotive parts market does not lack high-quality products; the core gap is a trusted mechanism to win consumer confidence. Factories need to cooperate with the industry to build a unified product and data standardization system, help the market overcome entrenched cognitive inertia, build trust in quality, and unlock sales channels.

2. Overseas business opportunities: The world is in a period of supply chain restructuring, and automotive aftermarket infrastructure is generally underdeveloped in overseas markets. China's automotive parts supply chain leads the world in completeness and response speed, creating clear overseas expansion opportunities. Factories can join forces on digital platforms like BatuLu to expand overseas in an integrated, capability-packaged model, replacing the old fragmented export approach, and build rooted growth in overseas markets.

3. Digital transformation insights: Factories can proactively advance your own digital transformation, connect to platform SaaS service systems, and leverage the platform's data capabilities and aggregated purchasing advantages to improve operational efficiency and access more cooperation resources.

For automotive aftermarket service providers, this article summarizes key takeaways on industry pain points and development directions as follows:

1. Core industry pain points: The automotive parts industry currently suffers from low standardization and high product differentiation, making it difficult to achieve economies of scale. The most prominent bottleneck is excessively high trust costs, as it is difficult to build user trust at low cost. Meanwhile, large B2B clients face strong pain points around supply chain management upgrades, while C-end consumers want more transparent, simple and predictable repair processes.

2. Reference for mature solutions: You can refer to BatuLu's transformation path: shift from an asset-heavy self-operated model to an asset-light "SaaS + supply chain management service" model, output your years of accumulated standardization and data capabilities to clients to help them manage their supply chains, generate revenue from service fees, and aggregate traffic for group purchasing to gain supply chain advantages.

3. Future development directions: You can prioritize布局 AI and overseas expansion: upgrade your end-to-end service capabilities with AI, and leverage China's supply chain advantages to export digital solutions to overseas markets and tap into incremental global demand.

For automotive parts platform operators, this article summarizes key takeaways on platform transformation and risk mitigation as follows:

1. Industry demand overview: The core demand the market places on platforms today is to solve industry-wide pain points of insufficient standardization and high trust costs. Large B2B clients need end-to-end supply chain management upgrade solutions, upstream factories need compliant and efficient carriers for overseas expansion, and the entire industry needs AI empowerment to improve end-to-end transaction and service efficiency.

2. Reference for platform transformation: Leading player BatuLu has validated a new viable platform model: it transformed from an original self-operated trading platform into a digital infrastructure platform for automotive parts, which does not participate directly in transactions or hold inventory, and outputs accumulated data, systems, supply chain and operation capabilities as a SaaS + supply chain solution. This model is far more sustainable, and delivered 30% year-over-year transaction growth in the past two years, making it a valuable reference.

3. Risk mitigation guidance: While the asset-heavy self-operated model delivers high short-term revenue, profits are easily eroded by inventory and capital costs, and scaling is extremely difficult. Platforms should avoid this type of model risk, and proactively布局 overseas expansion and AI to build a second growth curve.

For researchers of industrial internet in the automotive aftermarket, this article provides first-hand practical cases and new industry trends with key takeaways as follows:

1. Core new industrial problems: For China's trillion-scale automotive aftermarket, the core reason for slow industrial internet progress goes beyond low parts standardization: the more prominent bottleneck is extremely high trust cost. The entrenched cognitive inertia formed among users over years is far harder to overcome than product quality issues, and this is the core new problem the industry needs to solve.

2. Innovative business model research: BatuLu has developed and validated a viable new business model: it transformed from the traditional asset-heavy self-operated sales model to an asset-light "SaaS + supply chain management service" model, where it does not hold inventory nor advance capital, and earns service revenue by outputting digital and supply chain management capabilities, while integrating resources for aggregated group purchasing. This model has been validated in practice, delivering 30% year-over-year transaction growth in the past two years, and is far more sustainable than traditional models.

3. New industry trends: Three new directions have emerged in the industry that deserve in-depth research: deep value chain services, industrial overseas expansion, and industrial AI. Overseas expansion leverages China's supply chain advantages to output digital capabilities, while AI builds aftermarket-specific large models to empower the entire value chain — both are new exploration directions for industrial internet.