2017年11月，Ocado宣布与法国零售商Groupe Casino达成协议，为电商业务提供技术。两个月后又与Sobeys达成合作，Sobeys在加拿大经营1500家不同品牌的店面。“这是我见过唯一能实现大规模盈利的电商模式。”Sobeys电商业务高级副总裁莎拉·乔伊斯谈到Ocado时表示。
Ocado is now preparing for other worst-case scenarios; it has held rehearsals for what will happen if its employees begin to fall ill and entire teams need to self-isolate. (One possible solution: drafting furloughed workers from other industries to staff warehouses and drive trucks. The company has already reached out to recruit idled Uber drivers.)
面对大批许可经营协议，很多投资者不得不放弃怀疑，Ocado被大量做空的日子也一去不返。“之前我拼命做空，但Ocado跟克罗格合作后，我拼命做多。”股票研究公司伯恩斯坦负责欧洲零售商的分析师布鲁诺·蒙泰恩说。不过，相关交易并未增加太多利润，因为自动分拣中心建设完成后Ocado才能收到回报。
Rodney McMullen, Kroger’s CEO, says he had been watching Ocado for a decade, meeting periodically with its top executives. Kroger implemented a store pick–based -e-commerce operation after a 2013 merger, but McMullen says it became unwieldy as it grew. The struggle to keep both online and in-store customers happy was driving Kroger toward towards the same sort of automated fulfilment centers Ocado had. McMullen admits to keeping a close eye on Amazon and Walmart, but he insists the Ocado partnership is not about what competition might do. “We didn’t see a path where we could accelerate to where Ocado is in a year or two,” McMullen says.
Ocado’s partners are responsible for acquiring land, building external structures, providing a delivery fleet, and hiring workers. But Ocado has to build the hives, supply the robots and software, and provide training and on-site engineering support. It costs Ocado $40 million to $45 million in “peak cash outflow” for each average-size CFC, Steiner says. Only after construction does Ocado collect a fee based on the warehouses’ available capacity. In its most recent fiscal year, just 6% of Ocado’s revenue came from licensing.
单纯做超市业务的公司自动化速度慢得多。但在2017年6月，亚马逊推出的重大举措为Ocado推广现代化销售提供了V型助力。当时，线上百货商店亚马逊斥资137亿美元收购了在全球有500家门店的高档商品商店全食超市（Whole Foods）。杂货商普遍担心亚马逊也会吞掉自己的业务，因为亚马逊在其他行业有过先例，对Ocado技术的兴趣也骤然汹涌。
Investors seem confident that Ocado can capitalize on the current moment; its shares have risen 28% since Feb. 28, even as global markets plummeted. The future, however, looks murkier. Ocado’s licensing deals require it to spend heavily upfront to build dozens of CFCs. Those obligations have left some analysts wondering if the company, which currently carries more than $750 million in debt, has taken on too much risk. And, even once the pandemic passes, an existential question looms: whether any grocer, even with Ocado’s robotic helping hand, can withstand the onslaught of the Everything Store and the Behemoth of Bentonville.
The problem: The technology at Hatfield left a lot to be desired. The equipment Ocado was using—giant conveyor belts and sorting machines—was designed for the manufacturing sector, where factories churn out mass volumes of identical items. It was ill-suited for the grocery business, where the assortment of items is huge, and each customer’s order is unique. “I used to joke about the law of material-handling equipment, which was, Five plus five equals seven,” Steiner says.
Ocado像大多数杂货店一样，因社交隔离措施和恐慌性购买推动的出现需求飙升。3月该公司在英国的杂货销售额同比增长了20%以上。公司网站的访问量一度达到正常水平的100倍，高到公司的网络安全系统判断网站受到攻击。“这是我们有史以来流量最高峰。”Ocado集团传播总监大卫·施赖弗表示。
平日里，Ocado的机器人分拣仓库已业务繁忙，新冠危机爆发以来简直忙得不可开交。疫情蔓延也证明，即便人类劳动力面临前所未有的压力，杂货电商业务也能保持蓬勃发展。然而与此同时，危机也颠覆了日常生活，在Ocado有望在全球拓展业务之际可能影响业务增长。
Clarke signed on for a one-year gig, tasked with improving the system that controlled the flow of goods along Hatfield’s fast--moving conveyor belts. Ocado’s operation was so complex, Clarke says, that the only way to reengineer it was to build a series of digital “twins”—in essence, real-time software simulations of the operation. This allowed Clarke and his team to experiment with improved configurations before implementing them in the real warehouse, avoiding costly trial and error. Before long, Steiner says, the twins helped wring new efficiencies from equipment—making five plus five equal 12.
Ocado’s robot-powered warehouses thrum with activity on ordinary days; since the coronavirus crisis erupted, they’ve been in roaring overdrive. The pandemic has given the company a chance to prove it can keep an online grocery business humming, even when its human workforce faces unprecedented strain. Yet at the same time, the crisis’s upending of daily life has threatened to knock Ocado off its growth trajectory, just when it seemed tantalizingly close to becoming a global force.
类似疑虑并未影响Ocado筹集资金。2018年公司发行了1.87亿美元的股票。2019年2月，Ocado将50%的英国电商业务出售给英国零售商玛莎百货。对投资者来说，此次出售让Ocado定位更单纯，就是纯粹的技术平台，同时筹集了9.82亿美元。（玛莎百货也成为Ocado新的食品批发合作伙伴；Ocado与Waitrose的长期合同将于2020年底终止。）12月Ocado还出售了6.55亿美元的可转债。