Mother and baby app Mia will cease operations on September 10 after ten years of spotty performance. The latest mother and baby platforms to bite the dust, startups that once raised tens of millions are more or less all gone.
China has a huge mother and baby product market - 4.8 trillion yuan (US$700 billion) - but not a single e-commerce platform has survived.
LIU Nan, Mia’s founder started the business in 2011 as a small Taobao online shop. By 2015, it had finished three rounds of financing and was able to wage a price war on its peers. The price of disposable diapers went all the way down to 50 yuan from 128 yuan. Around 2016, Mia had a market valuation of nearly 10 billion yuan.
But that was it. Mia gradually lost its grip and in the next five years, closed all brick-and-mortar stores. The app suspended operations in September and products have since only been available through a WeChat mini program.
The same story applied to a long list of others. Beibei’s quarterly sales volume exceeded 100 million yuan a couple of years ago, but it ended up with its founder disappearing last year, leaving behind 140 million yuan of debt. The self-styled “world’s largest mother and baby community” Baby Tree went public in Hong Kong in 2018, and its share price went up to as high as HK$8 in the next year. Now the share price is only 0.47 HK$.
It was the price war that did for these apps. Constantly lowering prices to attract customers was not sustainable at all. And they weren’t just competing with each other, e-commerce giants like Alibaba and JD.com sell the same products without the cute fuss.
