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

The three good students are increasingly discovering that there are many talented people in the printing and packaging industry.

For example, Zong Fuli, daughter of well-known entrepreneur Zong Qinghou and current chairman and general manager of Wahaha Group, led the establishment of Songyu Printing and Packaging Co., LTD in her early years.

In the last two or three years, Songyu Printing has been in the top 100 list continuously.

Another example is Luohe Tianrun Color Printing and Packaging Co., LTD., a low-key company under the famous meat products company Shuanghui Development. According to recent public data, it achieved a revenue of 1.486 billion yuan and a net profit of 285 million yuan in 2022, with an amazing profit margin.

Just two days ago, the three good students found that Cao Dewang, the chairman of Fuyao Group, a well-known entrepreneur famous for its automotive glass products, who founded Fuyao University of Science and Technology, was also connected with the printing and packaging industry.

Because there is a packaging company in Fuyao Group: Tena Wang Packaging (Fuzhou) Co., LTD.

Founded in 2005, Fuzhou Tena Wang is 49% owned by Fuyao Group and 51% owned by Tena Wang China Group Co., LTD., which has a Japanese background. It mainly focuses on corrugated packaging products.

In 2024, Fuzhou Tena Wang achieved a revenue of 246 million yuan and a net profit of 17.650,100 yuan. The scale is not particularly large and the profit margin is normal.

About half of Fuzhou Tena Wang's revenue comes from Fuyao Group.

That is to say, this is a printing and packaging enterprise with strong internal service attributes.

From Wahaha, Shuanghui to Fuyao Group, so many famous giants and big bosses have printing and packaging related enterprises, which shows that our industry is indeed a basic and supporting industry that all walks of life cannot do without.

However, if the printing and packaging orders of all the giants and big bosses are digested internally, how can there be so many printing and packaging enterprises that are not reliable to the big tree?

That's all for the big boys.

What I really want to talk about today is an interesting phenomenon ——

Many bosses emphasize that they are the source of printing factories

The three good students used to write things, and their materials mainly depended on Baidu. Recently, they have increasingly felt that wechat is a good thing.

On the WeChat platform, you can find a lot of content that is not available on Baidu.

For example, the three-good students recently found that many bosses in the industry appeared in WeChat short videos, and they often mentioned the same word: source factory。

These bosses, some of their products are very diversified, some of their products are very focused, basically cover all kinds of mainstream printing and packaging products.

These bosses, some of their products are very diversified, some of their products are very focused, basically cover all kinds of mainstream printing and packaging products.

For example, business, books and periodicals, paper bags, gift boxes, color boxes and cartons, catering packaging, plastic packaging.

How do these bosses prove that they are the real source factories?

First of all, the factory must have a factory area and a factory.

As a result, many bosses will walk from the factory gate to the workshop, talking and telling stories as they go, showing them one by one through video.

Among them, it is essential to leave enough shots for the factory sign.

Some bosses will also emphasize the size of the factory, some say 3000 square meters, some say 5 or 6 thousand square meters, some say 10,000 square meters, 15,000 square meters, 18,000 square meters, and some say 33,000 square meters, and so on.

Secondly, it is not enough to have factories and workshops, but more importantly, there should be equipment that can be shown and make people feel refreshed.

For example, a factory in Shenzhen specializing in quick printing showed off its three HP indigo digital printing machines, eight color and black and white toner printing machines, three lamination machines, three paper cutting machines, as well as perfecting machines, saddle stitching machines and other equipment.

A factory in Zhengzhou, which specializes in commercial printing, showed off its small Sen five-color machine, four-color machine, Matini ride-in dragon, and equipment such as a sewing machine, folding machine, die-cutting machine, gold stamping machine and plastic sealing machine.

Third, with the factory, plant and equipment, there must be products.

Almost every boss will show off their product, but in different ways.

Some are holding products to speak for themselves, some are neat and orderly product exhibition halls, some are high-speed printing presses in production, and some are piles of finished products waiting to be delivered.

In addition to the factory, plant, equipment and products, how will the bosses prove that they are genuine and authentic source factories?

Some say they have a long history, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years; others say they have a large number of employees, from dozens to hundreds.

Some use investment to show their good taste, such as: invest in a small target printing factory; some use output value to prove their strength, the most common statement is: let me show you what a printing factory with annual output value of X million looks like.

Others use capacity to prove their strength, such as: some produce 100,000 color boxes per day, others produce 500 million color boxes per year.

Some want to win by price, for example: a small package of tea box quoted 0.X yuan.

No matter what the bosses say, the main purpose is no more than one: to advertise their factories, to gain popularity and to get orders.

the question is ——

Why do they emphasize the "source" factory?

But if the factory itself can make products, it can be said to be the source factory. Why do the bosses insist on the word "source"?

According to the three-good students, the underlying message is that there are a lot of factories in the circle that seem to be true or false, or middlemen without factories.

There are roughly two kinds of situations.

One type is online. Many shop owners on third-party platforms like Taobao and JD.com operate with minimal physical assets, lacking their own factories, yet they may give the impression of having robust equipment and production capabilities. Customers who place orders think they are dealing with a factory, but the actual production and delivery are handled by someone else.

At this time, the printing e-commerce store can be regarded as a non-source "virtual" factory.

The other is offline.There are many trading companies that mainly take orders, or middlemen like graphic and text quick printing shops that only have simple production equipment and need to subcontract a large number of orders. After receiving orders, they also need a real factory with factories and equipment to complete the final production and delivery.

In many cases, it is the factories that emphasize themselves as "source" in the video that provide production and delivery services to these online and offline middlemen.

In the printing circle, which seems to be directly from customers to factories, there are so many online and offline middlemen, which actually shows the richness of the industrial ecology.

The so-called "existence is reasonable" means that both online and offline middlemen must have their own value and reason for existence. For example, they have irreplaceable service capabilities or business resources.

So many of those who emphasize in the video that they are the owners of the source factories are speaking to middlemen.You have resources, customers and orders, I have factories, equipment, capacity and services, the price is reasonable, shouldn't we agree?

Of course, there are a lot of middlemen between customers and factories, which shows that even in today's world where many bosses think they are already on the way up, information asymmetry is still widespread in the market.

Many customers can not find the right printing factory, nor understand the quotation level of the printing source factory, which leaves room for middlemen to survive.

A report by Sanhao students said that the channel cost of sanitary napkins, which has attracted much attention due to safety problems recently, accounts for more than 40% of the total cost. The factory price of sanitary napkins is 0.32 yuan per piece, and the terminal price can reach 1 yuan per piece.

The channel markup of some printed products is much more impressive than that of sanitary napkins. For example, the factory price of A3 single-sided color pages is less than 20 cents per sheet, and the price quoted by quick print stores can reach around 2 yuan.

Therefore, it is not ruled out that many source factory owners want to make their voices heard by end customers while speaking to middlemen.

If customers can get the quotation from the source factory, the competitiveness of middlemen will undoubtedly be greatly reduced, because the intermediate price difference is really too large.

In this sense, the relationship between the source factory and the middleman is both cooperative and competitive. As for who can gain an advantage in the competition, the key lies in whether the information asymmetry between the customer and the factory can be broken。

Those who personally shoot videos and emphasize that they are the owners of the source factory are trying to break the information asymmetry.

job at the source factory

At present, the three-good students are concerned about the fact that most of the small and medium-sized printing enterprises that advertise themselves as source factories in WeChat short videos are not many, but there are not many that are really famous in the industry.

They generally focus on small and medium batch business, packaging products, with small, fast and flexible victory.

In fact, the real big customers with large orders generally have very strict control over the supply chain, and rarely find suppliers through short videos, which are very random and casual.

However, even in the small and medium batch printing market, it is not so easy to really do a good job of source factories.In particular, when some bosses spread their coverage of the market area to the whole country through short videos.

Because as a source factory, it usually competes not with middlemen, but with other factories that also want to get more customers and orders.

Once it comes down to the level of competition in physical factories, several common factors are important: efficiency, cost, quality, price, delivery capacity and so on.

How can you achieve sufficient efficiency, cost, quality advantages and competitive prices?

For physical factories, continuous equipment investment and renewal are basically indispensable and unavoidable.

But is it possible for every factory to keep investing? It's hard to say. In the competition between factories, there will always be owners who fall behind first.

How to ensure stable and reliable delivery? In addition to the support of production links, there should be an independent and controllable logistics system, whether it is self-built or cooperated with a third party.

At the same time, as a source factory, after reaching a certain scale, most of them will face a choice: to focus on serving intermediaries or concentrate on direct customers?

In the mass printing market, this question is easy to answer. While there are also printing plants that specialize in peer processing, most owners will choose to work directly with customers.

In the small-batch printing market, the problem is much more complicated. On the one hand, the temptation to work with direct customers is constant; on the other hand, the relatively high service costs of small-batch orders deter many owners.When the factory is small and its service capacity is limited, it can usually cater to both intermediaries and direct customers, because intermediaries do not feel much competitive threat.

As the size of the factory grows to a certain extent and it becomes possible and possible to acquire more direct customers, the competitive threat felt by the middleman may increase.

In order to prevent the loss of their customers and orders, middlemen will be more cautious in sending orders to factories.

At this point, if the factory owner is still promoting himself as a source factory in short videos or other occasions, middlemen will probably turn away.

As a result, the three-good students have yet to meet the real bigwigs in the industry, such as Shanda Printing and other similar companies, which trumpet themselves as source factories. Perhaps this is why.

Because focusing on providing processing services for graphic and text quick printing stores and peers is the basic logic for Shengda Printing and other similar enterprises to develop rapidly.

This logic is not easily broken.

That's all. Finally, I wish all the bosses good luck, whether they are middlemen or physical factories.