The role of small and micro enterprises in "steady growth"
China News Weekly reporter / Li Mingzi
Published in the 1034th issue of "China News Weekly" on March 7, 2022
Drive about 5 kilometers northwest from the old city of Wenzhou to Shuangyu Town, which is the well-known "Wenzhou Shoe Capital".
In the early days of reform and opening up, the handmade leather shoe workshops under the foot-washing bridge in Puxie City (street) in the old city of Wenzhou gradually developed and expanded, and moved to Shuangyu, forming an intensive industrial community.
Walking around the capital of shoes for 10 kilometers, you can find all the hundreds of parts needed to make a pair of leather shoes.
Also known as the "three states and one capital" (Guangzhou, Wenzhou, Quanzhou, Chengdu), which are important bases of the national footwear industry, after experiencing various industrial relocation changes, only Wenzhou still has such a mature and complete industrial chain.
Shuangyu has witnessed the glory of Wenzhou becoming the "Shoe Capital of China", and has also experienced the trough of bosses running away after the private lending crisis.
Today, shoes are still nourishing thousands of companies in the shoemaking industry chain, and this is one of the most congested areas in Wenzhou during the rush hour every day.
On February 7, the first day of construction after the Spring Festival holiday of the Year of the Tiger, the traffic on the road in Wenzhou increased sharply.
"The factory starts work on the seventh day of the first day. From the current point of view, the order volume in the first ten months of 2022 will increase by at least 30% compared with the previous year." Pan Jianzhong, general manager and chairman of Juyi Group Co., Ltd., said that foreign trade companies generally operate in At the beginning of the year, the production orders for the whole year will be received.
Benefiting from China's epidemic prevention and control policies, the company's production capacity is stable. Foreign trade production orders that were originally lost to Southeast Asia due to rising labor costs will gradually flow back to Wenzhou from 2022.
Pan Jianzhong believes that this order return will not be a short-term phenomenon.
After having survived the impact of the two-year epidemic, the output value of Wenzhou's shoe and leather industry is gradually returning to a comparable level in 2019.
"However, the epidemic has also caused some disadvantages of this traditional industry to break out ahead of schedule." A staff member of the Wenzhou Shoe and Leather Industry Association said that a report on his desk titled "Regional proportion of the total industrial output value of the national leather shoe industry" "The document shows that in 2020, the output value of leather shoes in Zhejiang Province will account for 14.59% of the national market, far lower than Fujian's 57.47%.
In other words, Wenzhou's leather shoes are outdated.
Just like other pillar-type traditional industries in Wenzhou, the shoe leather industry is also faced with the confusion of how to transform and upgrade, just like the confusion encountered by the "Wenzhou Model" in recent years.
"The Wenzhou model is essentially a market economy model dominated by the private economy." Du Chuang, director of the Microeconomics Research Office of the Economic Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and deputy secretary-general of the Private Economy Research Center, told China News Weekly that the Wenzhou model is very important to today's What can still be learned is how to make the market economy give full play to its vitality.
The triangular debt dilemma under the epidemic
As soon as the epidemic appeared, trade orders responded immediately.
"At first, domestic factories were shut down, unable to produce and supply. When the domestic epidemic was brought under control, factories resumed production, and overseas epidemics began to spread again, and domestically purchased goods could not be shipped." Xia Yong, general manager of a foreign trade enterprise in Wenzhou, told "China News Weekly", his company's export business volume in 2020 has shrunk by half, coupled with rising operating costs, the company will barely make a profit of several hundred thousand yuan in 2020, which is only a fraction of previous years' profits.
Affected by the epidemic, Wenzhou's footwear exports were almost cut off in 2020.
According to the statistics of more than 600 shoe export enterprises in Wenzhou by a third-party agency, the export volume fell by 38.79% year-on-year, and the annual export value decreased by 9.947 billion yuan year-on-year.
Affected by the global epidemic, the number of international flights has been reduced, combined with factors such as insufficient loading and unloading capacity of overseas ports, and there have been serious overseas empty containers stranded, while domestic "one container is difficult to find" and shipping prices have risen.
"Seeing that the freight has doubled, doubled, and tripled, it is almost catching up with the value of the container itself." Xia Yong introduced that the container was transported from Ningbo Port and Shanghai Port to Amsterdam in the Netherlands or Hamburg in Germany. As long as each box is 2,800 to 3,000 US dollars, it will rise to 15,000 US dollars per box in 2020, which is about 100,000 yuan.
Xia Yong was one of the first group of personnel in Wenzhou to go to sea to do foreign trade.
In the early 1990s, Xia Yong’s department responded to the government’s call to set up a foreign trade company. Since it did not have formal management rights, it was affiliated with other joint venture and private foreign trade companies in Wenzhou, the only state-owned enterprise with management rights in the city.
After 2000, the company was restructured and became a private enterprise.
After nearly 30 years of development, Xia Yong's company has accumulated trade resources for dozens of products such as shoes and clothing, hardware, building materials, low-voltage electrical appliances, valves, and sanitary ware.
The doubled logistics cost is a fatal blow to some small and micro enterprises.
Xia Yong's foreign trade products mainly come from traditional Wenzhou manufacturing industries, of which shoes and clothing products account for more than 60%, and the added value of the products is not high. A container itself is only worth 300,000 to 400,000 yuan of products, and the cost of freight is rising. , the profit allocated to each item is negligible.
Every August and September, European and American markets begin to prepare supplies for Christmas and New Year's Day, which is the peak period for foreign trade transactions.
Since it is difficult to find a container in domestic ports, the purchased goods can only be pressed in the workshop.
In previous years, Xia Yong's company had to ship out 1,230 freight containers, but in 2020 only a few hundred were exported.
Many private enterprises have experienced similar problems.
In the summer of 2020, in the factory area of Shuangyu Shoes Capital, Lucheng District, Wenzhou City, the shoes produced by Juyi could not be exported, and they were all piled up in the office of Pan Jianzhong, chairman of the group.
Juyi Group has both industrial manufacturing and import and export trade.
"Because of the epidemic, the collection period of enterprises is prolonged, and the operating costs of enterprises are increasing." Pan Jianzhong said that the company only needs 15 to 20 days to export to the United States, and 35 to 40 days to Europe. Ten days, maybe 60 days to Europe.
The collection cycle is prolonged and the loan interest is increased, but domestic enterprises have monthly payment of materials and wages of workers. The operating costs of enterprises are greatly increased, and the pressure on funds is great.
"Under the blow of the epidemic, many enterprises are deeply involved in the serious triangular debt problem. Because the upstream cannot make money, the downstream enterprises are under greater operating pressure. Many small and medium-sized enterprises will be closed in 2020." The above-mentioned Wenzhou shoe leather industry association staff said, "The epidemic has brought Wenzhou shoe and leather industry into a reshuffle period ahead of schedule."
On August 19, 2020, the Wenzhou Municipal Government issued the "Several Opinions on Further Helping Market Entities to Relieve and Support Enterprises to Overcome the Difficulties", and formulated the extension of the financial support policy time limit, the periodic reduction and exemption of corporate social insurance premiums, and support for upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain. Policies such as financing integration, increasing support for foreign trade exports, and promoting exports to domestic sales.
Xia Yong said that starting from the second half of 2019, the return of three policies such as social insurance and property tax deferral has helped companies reduce operating costs.
Just like being supported by a ventilator when it is critically ill, companies can breathe in the most difficult times. As for whether they can live better in the future, it depends on whether the company can open up new markets and channels.
"Policy assistance is to help companies tide over the difficulties. It can only be said to provide help in the snow, but it cannot completely solve the capital problem." He admitted that because the business scale has shrunk significantly during the epidemic, a local bank that has cooperated with Xia Yong's company for a long time suddenly suppressed loans. 50%, which is a more fatal blow to the development of enterprises.
"Although the company will not close immediately, its business scale will definitely be further reduced due to shrinking funds." Xia Yong is worried that the company will enter a vicious circle of "shrinking business - unable to raise funds - limited business scale", and another potential The risk is that several other cooperative banks may follow suit, and the company will really have nowhere to go.
In late September 2021, there are still two days until the loan expires.
Wenzhou City Financial Office sent an official letter to the bank and negotiated with the bank. Xia Yong finally got the newly approved credit from the above-mentioned local bank, but at a 20% discount.
"Bank loans are actually discounted." Xia Yong told China News Weekly that he used the company's office real estate for mortgage loans, discounted when evaluating the real estate, and then discounted when the loan was approved.
The emphasis on trade is "good products and low prices", coupled with the international payment method of "credit sales", the development of foreign trade companies relies heavily on capital strength.
Due to the lack of financial support, the transaction volume of Xia Yong's company has shrunk from more than 100 million US dollars at the peak to more than 40 million US dollars now.
Zhuo Chaohua, director of the Enterprise Service Department of the Wenzhou Financial Office, told China News Weekly that in addition to negotiating with banks not to suppress loans and to keep borrowing, there are also ten specific measures such as loan translation, installment repayment, interest reduction and exemption, and interest rate concessions. It was not invented after the outbreak of the epidemic, but the experience gradually explored after the Wenzhou lending crisis in 2011.
Continue to "demine" private lending
No matter how difficult it was, Xia Yong never thought of "private loans".
"If you look for someone else to guarantee you, others will look for you. If there is a problem with the guarantee chain, the company may go bankrupt and go bankrupt. If you don't have any money, you can just do a small business, and you can still live." Xia Yong Say.
However, countless small and micro enterprises in Wenzhou have suffered at this point.
In 2008, the annual output value of Furong Printing, which has been established for 11 years, reached 30 million yuan.
The founder of the company, Li Ganzhou's father, decided to expand the scale of the company. He bought land and built a factory in partnership with friends. He also imported two state-of-the-art printers from Germany at the time. The two equipment alone cost 32 million yuan.
Li Ganzhou's father never told his family how much foreign debt he had borrowed at that time.
In the following two years, as the national monetary policy changed from loose to prudent, many private small and medium-sized enterprises without financial support turned to private loans and even usury.
After the Ching Ming Festival in 2011, Huang He, the chairman of Jiangnan Leather Co., Ltd., the largest tannery company in Longwan District, Wenzhou, suddenly disappeared.
According to the data released by the Wenzhou Financial Office at that time, as of the end of September 2011, the number of enterprises whose bosses ran away due to inability to repay their debts accounted for about two ten thousandths of the total number of enterprises in Wenzhou, involving at least ten banks and dozens of enterprises. Guarantee companies, as well as many local residents, may involve an amount of more than 10 billion yuan, which triggers the "Wenzhou private lending crisis".
The year after the crisis broke out, Li Qianzhou’s father, who was doing his best to maintain the company’s operations, suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized. It was not until he took over the company’s finances that Li Qianzhou learned that Furong Printing had owed 245 million yuan in foreign debts, of which 180 million yuan was owed to banks and private loans were about 6500 yuan. million.
In October 2012, a shoe company that Furong Printing once guaranteed had a debt problem, and the boss of the guaranteed company ran away, and Furong Printing was burdened with a debt of more than 10 million yuan.
"The company's business space is still very large, but because of debt problems every day, I have no energy to manage the business and make the company bigger." Li Qianzhou recalled that he was calculating accounts every day when he opened his eyes. At that time, the company lost 18 million yuan a year due to operating problems. RMB, with an average monthly loss of RMB 1.5 million.
He not only finds a way to fill the gap and make the enterprise run, but also find a way to complete the regular repayment of the bank and deal with the private creditors who come to the door at any time.
What's more terrible is that in the environment of loan crisis, if there is no cash in the account, there is no business partner.
At that time, Li Ganzhou was filled with loans almost every day, either to repay the debt or on the way to borrow the money, driving like an airplane, walking and running, racing against time to borrow money and repay the debt.
While repaying private loans from bank loans, they also borrowed loan sharks from the private sector to repay the bank's arrears, constantly tearing down the east wall to make up for the west wall.
At that time, the annual interest on private loans was about 5 million yuan.
In order to repay the debt and maintain the company's operations, Li Ganzhou sold his marriage house and car. The self-owned houses of Li Qianzhou's eldest brother and second brother were also mortgaged by banks or sold to repay the debt. The whole family of more than a dozen people moved into the factory office building. Family.
However, more than a decade ago, financing for private enterprises in Wenzhou was not so difficult.
On December 11, 1980, Zhang Huamei, a 19-year-old girl from Wenzhou, received the "Industry and Industry Certificate No. 10101" license from the Wenzhou Administration for Industry and Commerce, which became the first individual industrial and commercial business license in China.
On May 12, 1985, "Jiefang Daily" published an article "Township Industry in Southern Jiangsu, Household Industry in Southern Zhejiang - Wenzhou 330,000 People Engaged in Household Industry", and publicly proposed the "Wenzhou Model" for the first time, that is, the production of small commodities as the Mainly, rely on farmers' supply and marketing staff and rural market purchases and sales to invigorate the circulation channels, and rely on a large number of skilled craftsmen and trade experts to open up the way to wealth.
The prosperous private economy has spawned active private financial activities.
In the 1980s, a type of credit transaction activity called "lifting" or "waiting" quietly appeared in rural Wenzhou.
In the beginning, only a few people formed a mutual aid society, and each person contributed a sum of money, and the person who used the money paid the others higher interest than the bank.
It is recorded in Thirty Years of Turbulence—Chinese Enterprises 1978-2008 that in Wenzhou around 1984, private funds circulated in this way exceeded 300 million yuan, becoming the most important capital driving force for the development of local private enterprises.
At that time, almost all the owners had borrowed or lent funds from the "lifting club".
Although Wenzhou private finance has collapsed and purged several times, private financial activities have never ceased.
According to Du Chuang, many private entrepreneurs are both borrowers and borrowers.
Individual creditors or private lending institutions have many "local methods" to identify lending risks. For example, both borrowers and lenders are from the same village and town, and one of them grew up under the watch of the other, so it is easy to obtain credit guarantees; If there is a factory near the institution, the creditor can check the electricity meter from time to time, and judge the production status of the enterprise through the power loss.
"Private lending has largely eased the financing needs of small and medium-sized enterprises in the development process." Du Chuang said, but it is also because the review conditions for private lending are relaxed that systemic crises are often prone to break out.
The crisis of Li Ganzhou's family was finally detonated in September 2014.
A small loan company that has long cooperated with Furong Printing Society stopped lending after receiving 3 million yuan in repayment.
Among the more than 300 employees of Furong Printing Press, more than 1/4 are disabled. The closure of welfare enterprises will bring greater social risks. Li Qianzhou went to Yongjia County Financial Office for help.
Yongjia County Financial Work Service Center will soon set up a special interest rate coordination group to help companies from three aspects, coordinate banks to not take out or suppress loans for Furong Printing, coordinate banks to reduce corporate loan interest, and use the government's emergency on-lending funds , to help enterprises with low-cost capital turnover.
On-lending is the most vulnerable link in the private lending chain.
When the bank loan is due to expire, many companies can't get enough funds to repay the loan, so they go to the private sector to borrow. First, the private loan interest rate is high, which once reached more than 25%; Private loans cannot be repaid, and enterprises can only close down, or the debts are transferred to the guarantor, which leads to a new private lending crisis.
Beginning in the second half of 2011, the Wenzhou Municipal Government established an emergency on-lending fund to provide bridges (help) for enterprises in difficulty to re-lending.
"These are Wenzhou's innovative measures." Zhuo Chaohua introduced, at the same time, the business department sorted out the enterprises with normal production and operation, good market prospects and good credit, but only encountered temporary difficulties. Targeted assistance.
"The drop in bank interest alone has saved us three or four million yuan. This real money is the fresh blood to help the company revive. I told the people in the financial office and the bank on the spot that I would I am confident that the company will be able to do well.” Li Qianzhou recalled that after solving the funding problem, the company made a profit of 2 million yuan in the second year, and production and operation gradually returned to normal. By 2018, the profit reached 19 million yuan.
"The main impact of the private lending crisis on enterprises is the rupture of the capital chain and the guarantee chain. To solve the debt crisis of enterprises, the focus is to focus on the 'two chains'." Zhuo Chaohua said that Wenzhou arranges risks, controls the source, disposes quickly, and takes out risks. The resolved combination of punches strengthened the "government, bank, enterprise and law" four-party linkage, implemented a series of innovative measures to stabilize enterprises and prevent risks, and promoted Wenzhou from "risk first" to "first breakthrough".
As the country's first comprehensive financial reform pilot area, Wenzhou has officially implemented the country's first financial local regulation "Wenzhou Municipal Private Financing Management Regulations" since March 1, 2014.
One of the core contents of the regulations is that private loans with a single loan amount of more than 3 million, or a total loan of more than 10 million, or borrowed from specific objects of more than 30 people, must be filed and registered.
The purpose of this requirement is to "force" private lending into the "cage" of government supervision, to avoid the "loyalty" phenomenon of "millions of loans without IOUs and a phone call" in the past, so as to resolve private financial risks.
According to the reality of public data, the registration volume of the registration center in 2019 is about 9 billion yuan, and it will be reduced to less than 3 billion yuan in 2020.
Zhu Jie, deputy director of the Financial Stability Division of the Wenzhou Municipal Financial Office, analyzed that the scale of loan registration has been reduced, although it is affected by the epidemic, but the willingness of private registration will be more affected by the policy.
"It is certain that the overall scale of private lending will be reduced, but it is difficult to assess the scale of the reduction." Du Chuang said that registration and filing is also a form of supervision, which will naturally reduce irregular lending behavior. At the same time, after the outbreak of the lending crisis, ordinary people participated in private Lending will be more cautious and calm.
Spare no effort to solve "financing difficulties and expensive financing"
In Xia Yong's impression, after the outbreak of the private lending crisis in 2011, the entire Wenzhou credit system collapsed, the financial environment deteriorated, and private enterprises were unable to borrow money from the banking system. not."
Bank loan suppression began to appear gradually six or seven years ago.
The company used to be able to lend 100 million yuan each year from one of the state-owned banks alone. After the loan crisis appeared, the banks began to suppress loans year after year from around 2015. In the end, they could only lend 30 million yuan each year from the above-mentioned state-owned banks. The loan products The structure is also not suitable for small and medium-sized private enterprises. Xia Yong can only give up cooperation with large state-owned banks and turn to a number of smaller banks for loans.
"Compared with insufficient supply, the problem of unbalanced services in financial institutions is more prominent. Large enterprises get together with credit, and small and micro enterprises are difficult to obtain a loan." The Wenzhou Practice of Economic Promotion of Common Prosperity" is summarized in the article.
In 2019, the government work report of the National Two Sessions proposed for the first time that the growth rate of small and micro enterprise loans of large commercial banks should be above 30%.
In 2020, we will continue to increase the weight, requiring large commercial banks to increase the growth rate of inclusive loans to small and micro enterprises above 40%.
In 2021, we will continue to implement the overall growth rate of more than 30%, and focus on reducing taxes and fees. It is required to "make financing more convenient for small and micro enterprises, and make comprehensive financing costs stable and moderate."
However, Liu Shangxi, President of the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences, pointed out that although relevant departments have adopted structural monetary policies to support financing for small and micro operators, and banking institutions have continued to increase financial services for private enterprises, the transmission of monetary policy is difficult to form. In the capillary channel, the difficulty of corporate financing is still reflected from time to time, such as high loan threshold, low loan amount, high financing cost, and long approval cycle.
"It is naturally difficult for large banks to lend to small enterprises, which is determined by the country's financial structure." Du Chuang analyzed that large banks have a long business chain from the head office to local sub-branches, in order to control financial risks and prevent enterprises and grass-roots bank branches Institutions collude and will strictly check the "verifiable information" of the enterprise before lending, such as credible financial statements, or high-value tangible assets and other collateral, which are usually not available to small and micro enterprises.
Coupled with credit problems such as information asymmetry between banks and enterprises, financial opaqueness, and uncertain risks, once the overall liquidity is insufficient, the credit scale of small and micro enterprises will be limited first.
In April 2019, Wenzhou's "Financial Brain" was officially launched.
The platform integrates more than 20 types of relevant business data and more than 150 types of labels collected by private enterprises in various departments. Through data mining technology, it can identify the risks of enterprises in the city, quantify the credit and risk levels of enterprises, and use them as Indicator prompts for measuring corporate financial risks help financial institutions to quickly identify the pros and cons of companies in the process of handling various financial businesses.
"Wenzhou people must be strong, and enterprises can solve problems through their own efforts. They will not take the initiative to ask the government for help. When they can't solve their own problems and then go to the government, the problem may be more acute." Zhuo Chaohua said that the disposal office is responsible for similar The role of firefighters requires not only post-event response measures, but also pre-risk warnings.
"To a certain extent, we have built a financial closed loop in which the government supports the development of private enterprises." Liu Xiao, director of the Financial Development Division of the Wenzhou Municipal Finance Office, said that the Wenzhou government has always spared no effort to solve the problem of "financing difficulties and expensive financing". As a key measure to help the operation of private enterprises.
For enterprises at different stages of development, the government provides targeted assistance to enterprises through different means such as credit fund support and issuance of bonds.
If the company is successfully bailed out, grows sustainably, or even goes public; if the company fails to tide over the difficulties and risks arise, the company's financial risk disposal office will do follow-up.
In order to further solve the problem of "more private funds, difficult investment, more small and micro enterprises, and difficult financing", Wenzhou Financial Office also launched a financial comprehensive service platform.
"The platform is equivalent to an online supermarket of financial products. It connects with companies looking for financing projects while connecting with banks to provide good financial products, so as to solve the dilemma caused by information asymmetry between banks and enterprises." Wenzhou Financial Office Jin Changxiao, director of the Statistics and Monitoring Office, introduced.
The market vitality behind the "Wenzhou model"
"In January, the major stores sold with great fanfare, and in February, almost all store sales activities were suspended." Looking back on the sales in early 2020, Cai Rongfa, secretary of the party committee and deputy general manager of Zhejiang Kangnai Group Co., Ltd., said that it used to be the main sales channel. The specialty store suddenly "runs out of food".
The epidemic has forced offline sales to shift to online.
Cai Rongfa recalled that offline stores were encouraged to do live broadcast sales and open up the inventory, but no one wanted to do it, because the offline business was too good.
As a result, when the epidemic came, the "online" rate was instantly increased from 20% to 80%.
Kangnai began to upgrade its intelligent manufacturing very early, from the introduction of computerized cutting and automated sewing machines, to the launch of an intelligent production arm like Juyi six months later.
The Wenzhou government has long seen the role of information technology in promoting innovation and productivity in the real economy.
In May 2016, the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of Intelligent Manufacturing in Wenzhou City 2016~2018" was released. Five emerging industries such as smart equipment and intelligent equipment are the key points. In December 2019, the "Traditional Manufacturing Remodeling Plan" was announced.
The digital workshop of Chint Group, a leader in the voltage and electrical industry, in Yueqing, Wenzhou, is one of the first factories in Wenzhou to fully resume work after the epidemic in 2020.
The assembly line workers at their desks are no longer visible in the workshop, replaced by robotic arms, welding robots and automatic packaging machines.
The smart workshop can be in full production 24 hours a day, reducing operating costs by 43%, while increasing production efficiency by at least 3 times.
Official data shows that Wenzhou's private economy contributes 90% of the city's tax revenue, completes more than 92% of industrial added value and more than 95% of foreign trade exports, provides more than 93% of jobs, and has more than 99% of the number of enterprises.
The "99999" pattern of Wenzhou's private economy is far higher than the "56789" level of the national private economy.
However, one of the articles in the "Blue Book of Wenzhou Private Economy" also pointed out that most enterprises in Wenzhou are still in the initial stage of digital and intelligent transformation.
The processes that have been intelligent are mostly concentrated in the middle and lower ends of the industrial chain. Most of the "machine substitutions" are limited to certain industrial links, and have not yet achieved full coverage.
In terms of industrial structure, traditional manufacturing is still the dominant industry in Wenzhou, while there is still a lot of room for development of strategic emerging industries.
In 2019, the total output value of the above-standard enterprises in the five pillar industries of Wenzhou electric, shoe leather, clothing, automobile and motorcycle parts and pumps and valves totaled 228.663 billion yuan, accounting for 41.79% of the total output value of the above-standard industrial enterprises in Wenzhou.
According to the "Wenzhou Statistical Yearbook", the total output value of industrial properties in the information industry was 15.950 billion yuan in the same year, accounting for only 2.92% of the city's, which was 6.67% lower than the level of Zhejiang Province.
Wenzhou itself is also facing the challenges of brain drain and entrepreneurial shifts.
After graduating from Wenzhou University with a major in artificial intelligence, he rarely chooses to work in Wenzhou. Wenzhou, located in the south of Zhejiang Province, cannot be integrated into the “Yangtze River Delta” competition, nor the “Haixi” competition.
Another survey shows that the average age of the first-generation entrepreneurs in Wenzhou has reached 55 years old, and 80% of the first-generation entrepreneurs want their children to take over, while only 30% of the second-generation entrepreneurs are willing to take over due to their good educational background and different interests. take over.
A staff member of a traditional manufacturing industry association in Wenzhou recalled that in the first ten years of the 21st century, entrepreneurs in Wenzhou had accumulated a certain amount of capital, and many people invested blindly, starting to speculate in real estate, coal, and garlic, investing whatever they made to make money. "From the real to the virtual", it is precisely at this time that the window for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries has been missed.
Coupled with the subsequent lending crisis, the overall upward pace of Wenzhou's private economy has been blocked, so that most private enterprises have low levels of technological innovation and low added value, and have fallen into a state of low-level involution.
How to find a way for the transformation of Wenzhou's private economy?
Du Chuang pointed out that from traditional manufacturing to high-tech, it seems that the industry has been upgraded, but in fact, two groups of people have seized their own development opportunities, rather than a certain group that is constantly upgrading and iterating.
Du Chuang used an interesting analogy. Wenzhou in the 1990s looked at the high-tech industries in Pudong, Shanghai, just as the Northeast, which was dominated by the state-owned economy, looked at Wenzhou's market-oriented economy in the early days of reform and opening up.
In Wenzhou in the 1990s, the traditional manufacturing industry was developing, and there was no need for enterprises to transform.
Another practical problem is that at that time, Wenzhou land was saturated and there was no room for developing new industries.
Unlike the urgency of "filling the stomach" in the early days of reform and opening up, Wenzhou enterprises have no motivation to transform or upgrade.
Some research articles pointed out that the private enterprises in Wenzhou are still dominated by traditional low-scale and small-scale industries.
"How small and scattered, it seems to be a derogatory term, but in some industries, such a pattern is good, dynamic, and able to share risks." Du Chuang recalled that in May and June last year, he went to Wenzhou for research and found that a certain There are thousands of shoe design and manufacturing companies in this jurisdiction, and most of them are small and micro enterprises. He is curious why the government does not promote business mergers.
Later, the investigation found that the design and manufacturing cycle of the footwear and apparel industry is long, and the fourth quarter products will be designed at the beginning of the year. this risk.
And if there are only two giant shoe companies in the whole city of Wenzhou, and one is betting on the wrong trend, the worst result may be that half of the city's workers engaged in shoe leather manufacturing will be laid off.
What's more interesting is that Du Chuang found that many small bosses from all over the country had luck in Wenzhou shoes. They only made a fortune in market segments and bet on the trend once, and they might make a fortune.
In Du Chuang's view, the small and scattered industrial structure is beneficial to industry innovation.
In order to grow and develop, small and micro enterprises will independently explore a variety of development possibilities, and let the market economy give full play to the vitality of the Wenzhou model today.
"How to transform and how to upgrade is ultimately left to the market's judgment. Enterprises choose the development direction that suits them, not 100% digitalization is the best choice for enterprises." Du Chuang said.
Ma Jinlong, former director of the Policy Research Office of the Wenzhou Municipal Party Committee and chairman of the Wenzhou Economics Association, also pointed out to China News Weekly that stabilizing industrial upgrading cannot be separated from its own advantages, otherwise the harder it is, the more backward it will be.
"Maintaining the vitality of the original ecological market is very important to Wenzhou, and it is also very important to the steady economic growth at the national level." Du Chuang said that sustainable economic growth ultimately relies on a dynamic market economy, and it is necessary to make the private economy better Give full play to the role of market players and allow private enterprises to explore more possibilities.
(At the request of the interviewee, Xia Yong is a pseudonym in the text)
"China News Weekly" Issue 8, 2022
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