/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/QUVHE6KTPZFDTCBZUM56RPPXUE.jpg)
Germán Torrado (Seville, 1975) savored the honeys of success too young. Specifically, as soon as the twenty had premiered. In 1995 he co-founded the Internet provider Arrakis, which in a short time reached a market share of 15% in Spain, and a couple of years before the dotcom bubble burst, he sold it to British Telecom for the equivalent of 10 million pesetas. of euros. “It marked me that in my first professional experience I had a growth of 18% per month. We reached 300 employees in just two years ”, he recalls. Perhaps because of this, the projects he embarked on afterwards were not enough for him. “I found that everything else was very slow. That, in other sectors, if you achieve 7% annual growth you are already a genius. So I had a good time frustrated, "he acknowledges.
Until he went on a prospecting trip to China. Torrado describes those 12 days in which he was offered to buy all kinds of companies as a disaster, but in the Asian giant he once again felt the business frenzy he longed for so much. And he did not hesitate: in 2006 he settled in Shanghai and once again plunged into cyberspace. But not to offer minutes of connection, but to give a bite to one of the few sectors that continues to grow in times of the coronavirus: that of Chinese electronic commerce.
Since the pandemic broke out between February and May, the number of new online stores opened on Taobao, the main platform of the giant Alibaba, grew by 200% compared to last year. And the revenue of one of its main rivals, JD, increased by 20.7% between January and March. Although overall consumption fell beyond 10% in the first half due to COVID-19, the volume of e-commerce grew at a double-digit rate and now accounts for a third of retail sales. “This virus is one more push for electronic commerce. It underpins a trend towards digitization that we see first in China, because it is more prone to change, and that will also occur in Europe ”, says Torrado.
But not all that glitters is gold. The Chinese ecosystem is a jungle where people kill mercilessly. “The problem is that companies that are not among the best in their category suffer a lot. Chinese e-commerce is changing so fast that it is difficult to adapt, ”he explains. “In the first period, until 2014, it was a very profitable sector because the Chinese economy was growing a lot and there was a unique consumer profile, who only looked for discounts and opportunities. Now, however, new purchase motivations have emerged, to the point that each consumer has almost a unique profile ”. On the other hand, the market has become fragmented and the Alibaba-JD duopoly has been broken to make way for new giants like Pinduoduo and niche platforms.
With Genetsis E-Commerce, Torrado works to make it easier for Spanish companies to sell their products in this complex mosaic. It would not be something new if it were not for the management and data analysis system it has created: “The platforms have continued to increase the price of their services and logistics costs have also risen. But the efficiency remains the same. And that is key, because we are moving towards a new model in which, unless something disruptive emerges like the Internet in its day, development based on gross growth will disappear. Our system allows us to get more out of the available resources ”.
The key to the service that Torrado offers in China, and which includes both the management of online operations and digital marketing, is in the data team that backs up these two often badly matched departments. “The engineers used to be in the basement and every now and then they would produce a power point . We place them at the center of the business, because the key to efficiency lies in technology. If you think that you do not need data for your business, you have two problems: that you do not have the data and that you have not yet found out that you need it ”, the businessman jokes in a meeting room of the offices that Genetsis occupies in Shanghai .
Control Panel
Aware that the mechanisms of his model are difficult to digest, Torrado explains how it works through the simple interface it offers to companies. In this particular control panel, sales are displayed on each platform, all types of indexes, customer profiles, and a map that reflects their origin. “The data team analyzes the situation and tells the other teams what to do. It is no longer a matter of intuition. The data defines the direction of a brand, the optimal price of a product or the strategy of a promotion ”, he comments.
Its algorithm makes use of big data because Genetsis acquires information about the market, categories or competitors from third parties. "That helps us to predict behaviors," explains Torrado. But the main ingredient in his model is small data , made up of all the customer data of the companies he represents: from their transactions to their interactions with corporate accounts on social networks and promotions. “We synchronize all this data to see if the strategies work. The more campaigns we run, the more the system automatically learns about what works and what doesn't. The algorithm, for its part, groups clients into different profiles and determines which are the best strategies for them, ”she says.
But the analysis is not enough. Now, Torrado wants to take a leap forward. Thanks to the investment of the Asian fund SOSV, its intention is to add a dozen data engineers and develop an artificial intelligence model that is capable of predicting and prescribing. “We will be able to generate scenarios to accurately predict the benefit of different investments and propose concrete actions. In addition, the fact that the system is multiplatform makes it easy to create a global brand strategy. We will be able to tell customers which product they should sell on which platform and at what price, as well as how much benefit they will obtain with a specific investment ”, he advances.
The objective of Torrado is to commercialize its system, which it has already patented, also outside of China and detached from the rest of the services that its company offers. "You just have to adapt the data sources to those obtained from platforms such as Amazon or Aliexpress," says this Andalusian who last year had a turnover of a million and a half euros with 17 employees and who has now proposed to end 2020 with a staff of fifty. It is still far from the one he once knew on Arrakis, but it is getting closer and closer.
