Excerpt from WeChat public account: Printing Entrepreneurs (Original by Wang Sanhao)

Halfway through 2025, it is becoming more and more confusing.

On the one hand, the bosses' exuberance over buying printing presses at the Beijing Printing Show has not yet dissipated; on the other hand, bad news has been pouring in for nearly a month.

First, on June 12, the well-known enterprise Hucai Printing and Art was ruled by the court to enter the bankruptcy reorganization process. Then, rumors of a real and fake explosion in the South China printing circle were reported, and it is said that more than a dozen enterprises lost 1.1 billion yuan.

Then there was Landa, which had just made its first public appearance in China at the Beijing Printing Show, and applied for court protection to suspend litigation on June 30, exposing its debt and cash flow crisis.

If no one is willing to take over or get new capital injections, the future of Landa looks grim.

Almost at the same time as Landa, news came from Guangdong.

First, I saw a boss in my circle of friends say: On the first day of the second half of the year, there was thunderous rumble throughout the printing industry chain. A relatively large printing factory in Foshan, Guangdong province announced yesterday that it was closed and liquidated...

A screenshot that hides the name of the company involved shows that the company owes financial institutions, mainly banks, about 32.8 million yuan in outstanding loans; about 13 million yuan in outstanding payments to suppliers; more than 2 million yuan in unpaid rent for industrial parks; and some customer orders are difficult to deliver.

Seeing this news, Sanhao thought: who is this company?

As a result, a friend sent me the full picture in the evening. It turned out to be a personal letter from a boss about the company's difficulties and inability to continue.

The main conclusion is that since June 30, the company has suspended all business operations and employees have been disbanded.

According to the report, this is not an ordinary printing factory, but an Internet startup or printing e-commerce company that once dreamed of "changing the printing and packaging industry".

What's more, the three good students and the boss had a chance encounter.

It was in late 2017, when the boss started out, that he talked about his entrepreneurial vision and the possible future of print e-commerce.

Founders who leave no room for themselves

When we met at the end of 2017, the boss must have been young. He was full of energy and confidence in my memory.

At that time, the boss had just left a popular e-commerce company for color box printing, and was planning his own e-commerce printing business project, still aiming at small batch packaging products with color boxes as the main product.Seven or eight years later, Sanhao student could not remember exactly what they talked about at that time, but vaguely remembered that the boss was very sure that the asset-light printing e-commerce based on Internet thinking would bring earth-shaking changes to the industry.

If the three good students had given him any advice at that time, it would have been: To make a small batch packaging business successful, the first thing to solve is the problem of efficient production and delivery.

Since then, Mitsuru and the owner have never seen each other again. He has only occasionally been in the news, but his e-commerce platform has raised several rounds of capital and changed its name, looking brisk.

Unexpectedly, the news he received this time was that he had been cornered with no way out and had to prepare for bankruptcy liquidation after the suspension of business.

In the situation report written by the boss himself, he first said that after obtaining tens of millions of financing and being recognized by many well-known investment institutions, he was full of ambition and dreamed of changing the printing and packaging industry.

However, "in recent years, due to the high investment in technology research and development, industrial parks, combined with the downturn of the printing and packaging industry, the company has been carrying a heavy load."

Faced with difficulties, he struggled to support: "In recent months, although I mortgaged my property and borrowed money at high interest rates to try to save myself, but with the new round of bank loans failed to be disbursed as scheduled, the company's capital chain has been completely broken, and there is no way to continue."

This is a story of entrepreneurship that makes you feel both sentimental and sad to read.

A boss who had been fighting for his dream for seven or eight years found himself on the verge of a broken capital chain. He risked his life by mortgaging his property and borrowing money at high interest rates, but in the end he was unable to recover.

The question is: How much of a chance does a business have to save itself when it has to borrow at high interest rates? Why do bosses have to bleed their last drop of blood?

In his briefing, the boss blamed himself and another co-founder for the company's troubles.

He said: "Under the internal and external troubles, we did not have enough ability to lead the company out of the difficulties until the dawn of the light", which was a shame to customers, suppliers, employees, creditors, shareholders and investors.

"The only thing I can assure you is that I have done everything I can and have left no way out for myself," he added

He stated that he still serves as the legal representative of the company. The company's tens of millions in loans were all guaranteed under his personal name. His only property was mortgaged twice and three times for corporate financing. He borrowed over 4 million yuan from relatives and friends to fund the company, with 3.25 million yuan remaining unpaid. Additionally, he took out 7.2 million yuan in high-interest loans for the company, leaving another 3-4 million yuan outstanding.

In addition, I have not received my salary from the company for a year and a half, and I rely on credit cards for daily expenses.Seeing this, Sanhao sighed again: This is indeed a boss and founder who has spared no effort and left no way out for himself.

It is difficult to change the dream of the printing and packaging industry

After reading the situation report written by the boss himself, Sanhao students searched the Internet.

In a May 2024 news story, photos of the owner were found. Years later, the young founder who was so full of life has gray hair.According to the report, he was no longer receiving a salary from the company. Starting a business is not something that can be done by ordinary people.

According to the news that has been released in recent days, a boss in Guangdong said that the company burned 170 million yuan in seven or eight years.

Whether this figure is accurate or not is impossible to verify. But it does burn a lot of money.

For example, the company has completed multiple rounds of financing such as angel round, Pre-A round, A round and B round. Among them, the angel round claimed to have invested 10 million yuan, the Pre-A round and A round claimed to have raised 60 million yuan, and the B round claimed to have raised nearly 100 million yuan.

The three figures add up to about 170 million yuan.

However, the situation report written by the boss himself showed that the amount of financing was tens of millions of yuan, indicating that some of the amount of financing he had previously claimed might have been inflated.

Even so, tens of millions of yuan in financing, plus nearly 50 million yuan owed to financial institutions, suppliers, landlords and customers, is likely to burn through more than 100 million yuan in seven or eight years.

If a boss invests 100 million yuan to start a factory, even if the printing is difficult in recent years, after seven or eight years, it is completely possible to make some profits even if we cannot make a lot of money.

But why did this boss, who dreamed of "changing the printing and packaging industry", lead his company to a difficult situation like those with the same dream, such as Sunshine Printing Network and Yiside?

First of all, big dreams require big money and investment. Because innovation has never been easy, and disruptive innovation aimed at changing an industry is even more difficult.

Without continuous and considerable investment of funds, this dream is almost impossible to achieve.

For a printing company, 100 million yuan is a large sum of money.

For the printing e-commerce industry that dreams of changing the industry, whether it is 100 million, 170 million, or 500 million won by Sunshine Printing Network, it may be just a drop in the bucket.

In other words, the boss may have chosen the right target and the path is fine, but the financing he has secured will not be enough to support him until the day of success.

If this is the case, it is undoubtedly regrettable.

But there is another possibility. The boss has chosen the wrong goals and path, and even if he invests more money and works harder, it will be difficult to achieve what looks like a great dream.

If this is the case, the outcome of suspension of operations and bankruptcy liquidation may seem unsatisfactory, but it is another form of relief and loss of money.

In the past year or two, from the bankruptcy and liquidation of printing e-commerce stars such as Tiede and Sunshine Printing Network, to the bankruptcy and restructuring of Hecolor Printing Art, which vigorously transformed to digital printing, to the collapse and suspension of operations of this enterprise, all proved that innovation is not easy.

Even if the bosses are confident and backed by all kinds of capital, they cannot make up for the flaws in their goals, path choices and underlying business logic.

Unless there is unlimited money, let the bosses try and make mistakes.

Small batch packaging is still a promising track

As for the company whose boss personally announced the collapse, did it have problems in its target and path selection? Or was it just bad luck, as various capital sources did not see its great future and provided sufficient support?

According to the family of a model student, it is not necessarily true that this company has chosen small batch packaging as its entrepreneurial track, and there is nothing wrong with this goal itself.

Because compared with the increasingly rigid mass packaging, or highly integrated small batch commercial printing products, small batch packaging is still in a crude and scattered development stage, and there is enough room for imagination to improve production and integrate the market.

The main question is: how to turn enough imagination into reality?

Like most entrepreneurs with Internet experience or who advocate Internet thinking, this boss has chosen the asset-light printing e-commerce model.

The basic idea is to integrate the order resources and then complete the production and delivery by integrating the third-party capacity.

Therefore, whether it can continuously obtain a large number of orders has become the key to its success or failure.

The question is: how can a printing e-commerce platform with no capacity continuously obtain orders?

Like many other bosses, the boss focused on platform building, software development, box knife library construction, marketing and customer acquisition, supply chain management, and set up a large team for this. According to relevant reports, the number of employees once reached more than 200.

There is a paradox here: compared with asset-heavy factories, the main advantage of asset-light e-commerce model should be low investment and fast expansion in theory.

However, the huge workforce and high labor costs completely offset the potential cost advantages of the asset-light model.Bosses, think about it: how much is the annual labor cost and overall operating cost of a team of more than 200 people? Isn't it not too much to burn 30 or 40 million yuan a year?

With a cost of 30 to 40 million yuan, how many orders are needed to fill the gap? According to a commission of 10 points per order, three or four hundred million orders are also needed.

What's more, according to information that is not conclusive, in order to open up the situation, the boss made many orders in and out at the same time, with a maximum commission of 6 points.

This will require at least $500 million in orders to cover operating costs.

Did the boss achieve 500 million? Some people say yes. However, in the opinion of Sanhao students, there is probably not that much.

In fact, for a light-asset platform enterprise facing small batch packaging, the order volume is not that much and can be barely handled. If the order volume really reaches 500 million or more, it may become a disaster.

Because for small batch packaging with customer unit price of hundreds or thousands, the supply chain management of massive orders, whether on time delivery or quality control and customer service, will be a huge problem.

It is in this sense that Sanhao students insist that the small-batch packaging market needs to achieve significant optimization and improvement of cost and efficiency at the production end before it can truly break out.

The three good students found that the boss must have realized the importance of the production side.

Around 2023, he invested in a packaging industrial park in Foshan, whose main model appears to be to attract supply chain companies to the park to form closer capacity cooperation, rather than investing in factories independently.

But by this time, his money was not so abundant. There is a theory that this accelerated the outbreak of the crisis. The "high investment in industrial parks" mentioned by the boss in the briefing also faintly reflects this point.

So can we say that the investment in the production side is the main culprit that brought down the enterprise?

Sanhao students, however, would disagree. The company's current predicament ultimately stems from flawed business logic and strategic missteps – much like other asset-light e-commerce platforms that dream of revolutionizing the printing and packaging industry.

At present, the production side can not support the rapid development of small batch packaging e-commerce platforms, which may be the biggest problem.

In the end, whether it's a success or not, we have to salute all the people who have dreams, especially those who go all out for their dreams.

That's it. As always, I wish you all the best.