Haitian kept distributor power in check with dual-chariot system

The standard playbook for a consumer-goods company entering a new city is to appoint one exclusive distributor, simplifying management, contracts and coordination to a single relationship per market. Over years, that exclusive distributor typically becomes indispensable: it controls the manufacturer's only route to retailers in that city, accumulates leverage as its own sales volume grows, and can extract better terms or slower payment, or simply threaten to switch to a rival brand, knowing the manufacturer has no fallback in that market.

Haitian, China's largest soy sauce and condiment maker, faced the same structural choice every consumer-goods company does when building out distribution: simplify with one partner per city, or accept more coordination overhead in exchange for never letting any single partner become too important.

Haitian deliberately installs at least two competing first-tier distributors in the same city or region rather than one, a structure sometimes described internally as its 'dual-chariot' (双驾马车) system: the distributors compete for volume and can be swapped out or reduced if they underperform, and no individual distributor is ever the sole route to that market. The company backs this with tight, digitized channel management, tracking inventory and pricing distributor by distributor to keep visibility even as the number of relationships multiplies.

Installed two competing distributors per city so no single partner was indispensable, backed by digitized tracking to manage the multiplied relationships.

Competing distributors know they can be replaced, so they cannot extract better terms.

Haitian always has a fallback route to retailers, removing the sole-path leverage.

Digitized tracking keeps visibility and control even with thousands of partners.

Low customer concentration (top five ~2.18%) gives Haitian permanent negotiating leverage.

When a partner's cooperation becomes indispensable, they gain negotiating power; deliberately fragmenting the channel prevents any single partner from becoming essential.

Haitian's distributor base has run into the thousands of independent partners, over 7,000 as of 2022 and still more than 6,700 by the end of 2024 even after active pruning of underperformers, and no single relationship carries outsized weight: distributor and dealer sales together made up roughly 97 to 98 percent of Haitian's total revenue from 2022 to 2024, spread thinly enough that its top five customers combined accounted for only about 2.18 percent of total sales in 2023, an exceptionally low concentration for a company of its scale.