The well-known entrepreneur decided to sell the company

Cui Weixing

Wen | Feng Ma Niu (WeChat public number: Feng Lun Feng Ma Niu)

Five years ago, Liu Qiangdong once said, "In the future, only two express delivery companies in the domestic logistics industry may survive, one is JD.com and the other is SF."

At that time, many people questioned Liu Qiangdong, but now it is getting closer and closer to realization.

On the evening of March 13, JD Logistics announced that it would acquire 66.49% of debon's shares for 8.976 billion yuan, and the two sides would carry out in-depth cooperation in the fields of express delivery, cross-border, warehousing and supply chain.

In the industry, Deppon has always been known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" in the logistics industry. As the founder of Debon, Cui Weixing started from "4 people, 8 square meters", and led the company to become one of the most well-known logistics enterprises in China. Now, debon has changed hands, and Cui Weixing's role will undergo a change in nature.

In the early years, in the brilliant moment of the enterprise, Cui Weixing once said, "Diligence is not necessarily success, success requires tips, directions and persistence, the reason why Debon Logistics Company can have today's achievements, relying on the 'different' performance from small things, different."

1

In 1992, Cui Weixing graduated from the Department of Accounting of Xiamen University, majoring in accounting, and in the same year was assigned to China International Travel Service in Guangdong Province as an accountant in the finance department. In October 1993, due to his low income, Cui Weixing was dissatisfied with the current situation of work at that time, so he quit his iron rice bowl and went to work in a large restaurant in Zhuhai, still working as an accountant, but his salary rose threefold.

In the Spring Festival of 1994, under the introduction of his old colleagues, Cui Weixing came to Work at Guangdong International Freight Company (a subsidiary of Guangdong International Travel Service) and was sent to Zhongshan to develop the most original freight business. In the past two years, Cui Weixing has accumulated rich freight experience and a considerable part of customer resources, but the leaders of Guangdong International Freight Company believe that the business development of Zhongshan business point is not good, and decided to abandon Zhongshan business. However, Cui Weixing did not give up, and after several fundraising, in 1996, Cui Weixing founded the "Cui Freight Company", which is the predecessor of Debon. At first, Debon carried out sweater consignment business in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, and moved to Guangzhou in 1997, mainly engaged in sweater and electrical appliance consignment business.

When Debon was first founded, there were only four people, Mr. and Mrs. Cui Weixing, as well as a driver and a porter. In the beginning, Cui Weixing was very unlucky, crashing into a taxi and losing the goods of the guests... However, with high-quality services and experience such as door-to-door pickup and self-delivery, Debon's cargo volume continued to increase, and by the end of 1997, Cui Weixing's total assets reached 200,000 yuan, earning the first bucket of gold in his life.

Because he had to run a trip to the passenger and freight office of the old cadres of China Southern Airlines (Group) Company every day to deliver goods, Cui Weixing met many friends of China Southern Airlines. It was at the prompt of a friend that in 1998, Cui Weixing contracted the old cadre passenger and freight office of China Southern Airlines and entered the air freight forwarding market. But the first month lost 30,000 yuan, employees almost ran out, after suffering for 3 months, Cui Weixing innovated a new mode of transportation - air freight large tickets, the same place of customer goods concentrated together to issue a ticket, after arriving at the destination, and then according to the customer's delivery list for sorting, thus obtaining more and more small and medium-sized customers, the company can also be reborn.

In 2001, Debon began to enter the field of road express, that is, the LTL market. This time, Cui Weixing's company lost money for a longer time, resulting in partners leaving one after another, and the company almost collapsed. Before that, Cui Weixing never knew what insomnia was like, but from then on he often had insomnia.

It is understood that when Debon first entered the LTL market, the market was actually very saturated. But this market is also a scattered, chaotic, poor market, although the number of practitioners is large, but more than 90% of them are small private line companies. At that time, there were as few as dozens or hundreds of special line companies from one city to another, and the means used by various companies to compete were often price wars. As for the loss of goods, damage and delays, it is not uncommon in the industry.

As a latecomer, Cui Weixing decided to crack down on these ills one by one.

On the one hand, Deppon promotes the concept of logistics standardization, and its meticulous and standardized approach is unique in this industry. Debon's outlets and stores are self-built, vehicles are also bought by themselves, outlets and vehicles are using a unified image and logo, in the store opening, store environment, service content, transportation control, line laying and other aspects have established a strict standardization system, to provide customers with standardized services. Internally, Deppon also adopts standardized management, such as the implementation of cargo stacking "big without pressure, heavy without pressure, wood without paper" and so on. Deppon also invested heavily in creating an electronic monitoring system to monitor the entire process of freight. For example, Debon's electronic monitoring center will monitor all truck drivers on the road through two cameras installed in the cab of the truck, eliminating the driver's smoking and fatigue driving in the cab.

On the other hand, Cui Weixing once said: If the company wants to develop, it must always put the element of "people" first, and "people" is the core competitiveness we can rely on. Since 2006, Debon has taken the lead in launching school recruitment in the logistics industry, and since then it has begun to fully implement the strategy of independent training of talents, laying out the key talent echelon in advance for the long-term development of enterprises, and Debon has also been praised by the industry as the Whampoa Military Academy in the logistics industry.

Through the above changes, in 2010, Debon became a leading enterprise in the field of road LTL logistics in China with an annual operating income of 2.62 billion yuan. At that time, Cui Weixing said, "There is a crisis to have a chance, and there are difficulties to stand out." Along the way, there is hard work and fun, and overall it is very cool! Do you know why I like long-distance running? Because for me, the chance of winning long-distance running is the greatest."

2

In an interview, Cui Weixing repeatedly mentioned to reporters that he was a "conservative" person, "I do things on the surface is quite slow, do a little deeper, do a little more thorough research, and hope that the company can move forward steadily." 」 However, the mall is like a battlefield, and when competitors are running wildly, small steps mean falling behind.

In 2013, the growth rate of the road transport market began to slow down, while the express delivery market was growing explosively, mainly due to the rapid growth of e-commerce, and the express delivery business took away part of the LTL business. At that time, under the advice of consulting companies, Debon also tried to change and officially entered the field of express delivery. In order to stagger the competition with traditional established express delivery companies such as SF and Tee Yida, Debon positioned its business as "China's most cost-effective large-scale express delivery", mainly targeting items with a cargo weight of 3kg-60kg. However, in the eyes of many people in the industry, this time has missed the best time, "began to be too conservative, the company believes that doing e-commerce parts is too low, not profitable." By the time you're really ready to make your efforts, it's too late."

In a letter to all employees in 2016, Cui Weixing told employees that the express delivery industry will be concentrated in the future, and the time left for Debon is running out. If you want to avoid being slaughtered by others, you must act immediately and kill a bloody road as quickly as possible. Using speed to beat time is our only vitality.

At the beginning of 2018, Debon was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. At that time, Cui Weixing said, "Debon has been in business for 22 years, and it is said that the years are not spared, but I have not spared the years. Today I would like to say that only by using the concept of long-distance running to run a life and run a company is it qualified to stand here, although the company has developed from 4 people to 30,000 people, but I think that the 25 laps of the 10,000-meter long-distance run have only run three or five laps, and the good drama is still to come." In July of the same year, Debon held a press conference to officially announce that the name of the company was changed from "Debon Logistics" to "Debon Express", and the large-scale express delivery business was fully developed. At that time, Cui Weixing said: I firmly believe that under the catalyst of the rapid development of e-commerce, China's transportation market will soon usher in an hourglass. I am more convinced that Deppon, as China's LTL boss, can lead the entire industry to a higher-order and more reasonable structure in the process of LTL express delivery.

However, Deppon's business transformation was not successful.

From 2017 to 2020, the net profit of Debon shares was 547 million yuan, 701 million yuan, 324 million yuan and 564 million yuan, respectively, an increase of 43.87%, 28.22%, -53.82% and 74.39% year-on-year, respectively.

At the end of January this year, Debon issued a performance forecast. According to the preliminary calculation of the financial department, it is expected that the net profit attributable to the shareholders of the listed company in 2021 will be reduced by 378 million yuan to 491 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 67.00% to 87.00% compared with the same period of the previous year (statutory disclosure data); the net profit attributable to the shareholders of the listed company after deducting non-recurring gains and losses is expected to decrease by 371 million yuan to 484 million yuan compared with the same period of the previous year (statutory disclosure data), a year-on-year decrease of 176.04% to 229.56%.

For Debon's current loneliness, some insiders sighed: First, Debon's advantages are in LTL express, but China's road freight marketization has long been in weak, small, scattered, disorderly competition, capital-supported franchise model enterprises and network freight platform enterprises in recent years wolf expansion, to steady-based Debon logistics in the express market by the franchise express to catch up; in the express delivery market, large express delivery lack of substantive breakthroughs, these are pressure on the capital market Ofdebon shares are under pressure. Second, in fact, the boundary between large-scale express delivery and express transportation is blurred, debon's large-scale express delivery story is nothing more than "left pocket to right pocket", the so-called growth of large-scale express delivery has not really increased its business income much. Third, Debon's huge functional system wasted a lot of labor costs, 20 years of development, science and technology investment is too small, the pace of stability is destined to be eliminated in the era of elimination.

In an interview with 21st Century Business Herald, Zhao Xiaomin, an expert in express logistics, once said: Debon shares have at least 3 opportunities to be corrected. The first time, when the valuation was high, Debon shares chose to queue up for IPO listing, rather than backdoor borrowing, missing an opportunity period; second, only half a year after the listing, Debon Logistics changed its name to "Debon Express" and made a major decision to enter the large-scale express delivery, but did not change the structure and talent model; the third time, Yunda shares strategically invested in Debon shares to achieve a "physical alliance", but failed to have substantive integration actions.

In fact, Cui Weixing also reflected, at an industry summit in mid-2021, he said: Debon Express has changed a lot in recent years, first listed, after the listing just started to be good, 2019 stock prices went down again, 2020 under the epidemic slightly improved. In the past three years, Debon Express has taken a roller coaster ride. I was proud when Debon Express went public, but I feel a lot more humble in the past few years. In the past, we did not learn SF solidly, nor did we learn Huawei, and many times we learned the surface. In fact, how Huawei does benefit analysis requires us to study for a long time. Debon Express has studied Huawei for 20 years, and the more we learn, the more we find that we are too proud and too shallow. In the next few years, I hope to see more of my shortcomings, learn more, know more, and hope that I and Debon Express will be more modest, more in-depth and more careful in learning Huawei and SF. Anyway, the roller coaster has been sitting, can not sit in vain, to grow a little, a little progress.

Cui Weixing said, "I used to be a little proud, before Debon was bent on being big, growing fast, and doing scale, but in the long run, I still want to be specialized. Now the express logistics industry, the competition is very fierce, how debon express can survive from the fierce competition, can live a little better on the basis of survival, is a very challenging thing, but also I have been working hard to do things. How to smoothly tide over this round of ebb and flow, we can only summon up the momentum to go up against the current."

3

Debon once had an image song called "Our Dream", and the first paragraph of the lyrics was: Every day is a new journey / Today's me is different from yesterday / Young hearts must be brave on the road / Step through the rough and bumpy to see the rainbow in the sky...

Now, JD Logistics will acquire Debon, and some people think that Cui Weixing succeeded and cashed out a huge amount of wealth; others think that he failed and could not lead the company out of the predicament. But it doesn't matter anymore. As Cui Weixing said, "There are always opportunities, and the most important thing is how to seize the future."

Source:

1. Debon Express official website

2. Don't do big things: JD Logistics spent 8.976 billion yuan to acquire 66.49% of Debon's shares, Forbes

3. Debon "changed his surname", Cui Weixing became a "worker", 21st Century Business Herald, Cao Enhui, Fei Xinyi

4. JD.com "De" Bang, Economic Observer, Huang Yifan

5. Blockbuster official announcement! The A-share company sold to JD.com, and the founder once sent gold bricks to couriers, Daily Economic News, Zhao Wenqi and Wang Yubiao

6. He dared to argue with Wang Wei, because in the market, small goods were sent to SF, large goods were sent to his company, China Entrepreneur Magazine, Hu Kun

7. Cui Weixing, chairman of Debon Logistics: Doing business is like running a long distance, First Financial Daily, Chen Shanshan

8. Debon Express Cui Weixing: Doing the main business deeply and thoroughly is the "big move", Yunlian Think Tank, Yang Hongyuan

9. The struggle of Debon founder Cui Weixing, the world of labor security, Wei Yang

10. Cui Weixing: Twelve years of grinding a sword, modern logistics newspaper

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The author of this article | The chief editor of the army | Wang Tao

Wang Shuqi, consultant | Chen Runjiang, editor|