The ＂bad check＂ prevails in LED industry, and the triangular debt of small and medium-sized enterprises tightens the capital chain.

Every editor | Every reporter Guo Rongcun from Shenzhen and Zhongshan　　　　

Every reporter Guo Rongcun is from Shenzhen and Zhongshan.

After waiting for more than a month, Luo Ziming didn’t want a penny back.

"Xie Yingxiong has 60,000 yuan and a car in his hand. How much do you think you can divide?" Luo Ziming said.

Xie Yingxiong used to be the owner of Xiongji Lighting Factory, a billion-dollar LED enterprise in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province. At the beginning of July, the company’s capital chain was broken, and Xie owed Luo Ziming and many other suppliers 25 million yuan to run away (for details, please refer to this newspaper’s report on July 8, 2013: "The epitome of low-end LED industry: Zhongshan billion-dollar giants" fell "on the road of low-price competition").

On July 18th, Xie Yingxiong was arrested in his hometown of Meizhou, Guangdong. However, Xie Yingxiong has lost his solvency, so until today, Luo Ziming didn’t get a penny back.

Luo Ziming’s experience is not a case. Recently, national business daily reporters in Zhongshan, Shenzhen and other places found that due to the poor sales of terminal products, the triangular debt problem in the entire industrial chain of LED industry has been very serious, and many small and medium-sized enterprises have tight capital chains, and the crisis caused by capital problems is accumulating.

Default on payment by writing a check/

Luo Ziming has given up much hope of getting the money back. He runs an LED lighting accessories company in Guzhen, Zhongshan City. On the day before Xie Yingxiong ran away, the other party asked him to send more than 20,000 yuan of goods. "In this industry, there are too many debts in business dealings and many people run away."

Like Luo Ziming, Zhang Weiqi was also the victim of the collapse of Xiongji Company. Taking a fancy to the perfect supporting capacity of Guzhen lamp industry, he came here from Jiangsu and Zhejiang a few years ago and started a lamp holder company. Because Xie ran away, he paid more than 200,000 yuan to Shui Piao.

The debt problem of LED industry makes Zhang Weiqi miserable. In his words, once a company goes bankrupt, it almost means that all the hard work of one year is in vain.

Zhang Weiqi took a stack of checks, shook them and said to the reporter, "Look, these are all empty checks." In the ancient town, it is very popular to default on payment by writing checks. According to Zhang Weiqi, these checks don’t look strange on the surface, but there will be problems when you go to the bank to withdraw money. For example, some passwords are wrong, some are deliberately blurred by one or two words, and eventually you can’t get the money.

Zhang Weiqi said that the general payment method in the LED industry here is monthly settlement, which takes one or two months, and then one month’s check, so it is three months. And when you go to get the check, the finance is gone, the boss is gone, and it will be delayed for another month, that is, four months. "Now it takes half a year to turn over the money, which is very much."

Not only the ancient town of Zhongshan, where LED industry gathers, but also the problem of arrears in Shenzhen is equally prominent. Now, Li Wei, manager of Shenzhen Ruiwang Semiconductor Co., Ltd., has been afraid to take orders casually. "At present, we mainly do familiar customers with good reputation, while unfamiliar customers are cautious."

Li Wei’s company mainly makes LED phosphors and belongs to the upstream supplier of packaging enterprises. He told the reporter of national business daily that the phenomenon of arrears in the whole industry is very common now. What you owe me, I owe him. In order to ensure the safety of cash flow, if he meets a strange customer, he will know the company clearly before he dares to supply it.

Shenzhen Ouyamei Technology Co., Ltd. mainly produces and sells LED industry equipment. Wang Jiang, the person in charge of the company, told reporters that the capital chain of some LED companies is "quite tight."

In this case, he didn’t even dare to urge the downstream packaging enterprises to owe them money. "As soon as I urged you, I decided that the money was not needed, and the machine wanted us to take it away."

Wang Jiang said that the triangular debt problem of the LED industry in Shenzhen is very serious at present. The downstream lighting factory owes money to the midstream packaging factory, and the packaging factory owes money to the upstream chip and phosphor companies, so that the arrears are pushed up one after another, and finally a debt chain is formed along the industrial chain.

And the severity of this debt chain is still deepening. Wang Jiang said that although the market situation is not very good, enterprises generally don’t choose to stop production, not only because it will be more troublesome to recruit workers after stopping production, but more importantly, once the production is stopped, suppliers will speed up the dunning, and then they will have to wait for bankruptcy.

The problem of capital chain has caused banks to be alert/

Zhang Weiqi said that being in arrears with the payment for goods is not the most terrible thing. If there is another hero, I may go bankrupt with it. This is the most terrible thing.

According to the incomplete statistics of national business daily, since July this year, five LED enterprises have closed down in Zhongshan and Shenzhen alone. These closed enterprises involved hundreds of suppliers, which made the negative impact spread outward in a wave form.

The latest bankrupt Shenzhen Leixingguang Electric Co., Ltd. is a company directly dragged down by arrears. According to the reporter’s understanding, this company was established in April 2010. Before the bankruptcy, the payment of 1 million yuan was delayed, but the upstream suppliers kept urging money, which led to the break of the capital chain.

The problem of capital chain has aroused the high vigilance of banks. It has been publicly reported that the Guangdong branch of a big bank has urgently notified its subordinate branches to warn of the risks in the LED industry. The branch believes that the investment scale of LED industry is growing rapidly, overcapacity is prominent, and systemic risks appear.

In the view of Zhang Xiaofei, president of the Institute of LED Industry, such a debt relationship will have a chain reaction once there is a problem in a certain link. This chain reaction is first manifested in the possibility of directly dragging down a supplier.

And the impact of the chain reaction is not limited to this. Zhang Xiaofei said, for example, if a display company goes bankrupt, its suppliers may be very nervous. In addition to looking for closed enterprises to recover the payment, the supplier may immediately ask other enterprises or customers for money, causing other enterprises to have tight capital turnover problems.

"This industrial chain itself is relatively tight. Once one place is broken, others may be broken." Zhang Xiaofei judged that when everyone is nervous to a certain extent and there is no money to make, someone will fall down. Once someone falls down, there will be a chain reaction.

Zhang Xiaofei reminded that compared with lamps, LED display enterprises are in a greater dilemma at present. First, the production of display screens requires higher capital and space; Second, under the background of the country’s vigorous promotion of frugality, frugality has also received responses from various places, which will have an impact on the sales of LED display screens.

Wang Jiang said that when the market is not good, it is extremely important to keep cash flow. On the one hand, we should reduce expenses as much as possible, on the other hand, we should not blindly expand.

Unclear business model or main reason/

Liu Jun, deputy secretary-general of Guangdong Lighting Electrical Appliances Association and director of Guangdong Guangya Lighting Research Institute, said in an interview with national business daily that the root cause of the triangular debt is that the downstream LED lighting application enterprises do not make money and their business models are unclear.

"Take the three major channels for domestic sales of application products as an example, and the e-commerce channel burns money; It is difficult to distribute goods and collect money through distribution channels; In the engineering channel, the EMC (contract energy management) model is too expensive, and the money is not easy to collect, or the projects of the government and real estate developers have to be pressed for money, and there is little cash purchase. "

Liu Jun said that in this context, many enterprises are forced or pushed forward, but it can be clearly seen that the lower end of the industrial chain lacks cash flow.

Wang Jiang told reporters that if the whole LED industry chain is compared to a big tree, then the downstream application links are like roots, which need to absorb nutrients from the soil of consumers, and then conduct nutrients upwards to maintain the vitality of the whole tree. But the problem now is that the sales of these end products are not very smooth and the bargaining power is weak.

According to the reporter of national business daily, the poor terminal sales are related to the large-scale expansion of production capacity of enterprises in the first half of the year. From March to June this year, the LED market showed a short-term recovery, and many people in the industry predicted that the LED industry had ushered in an outbreak period, so there was a phenomenon of oversupply.

"In the first half of the year, the LED market was really good, and many customers couldn’t even get the goods, so everyone started to install equipment and expand production capacity, resulting in overcapacity and sales difficulties in the second half of the year." Wang Jiang said.

LED is called the third light source revolution and is regarded as a sunrise industry with good development prospects. At the beginning of this year, Chen Yansheng, vice chairman and secretary general of China Lighting Electrical Appliances Association, mentioned at a meeting that there are more than 10,000 LED manufacturing enterprises in China, with a large number of enterprises but a small scale.

Zhang Hongbiao, research director of Hi-Tech LED Industry Research Institute, said in an interview with the media that there has been obvious overcapacity in LED lighting enterprises across the country. In the first half of this year, the capacity utilization rate of domestic LED lighting enterprises was only nearly 60%, slightly better than before.

sectoral dynamics

Behind the triangular debt of LED industry: 14 listed companies have high receivables.

Every reporter Guo Rongcun is from Guangzhou.

On August 27th, Wanrun Technology (002654, SZ), an LED industry company, released the semi-annual report, and the company achieved an operating income of 202 million yuan, a slight increase of 2.82% year-on-year. However, the company’s accounts receivable reached 123 million yuan, more than half of the revenue, an increase of 14.99% over the 107 million yuan at the beginning of the year.

National business daily made statistics on 14 key listed companies in LED industry that have published semi-annual reports, and found that the accounts receivable of these 14 companies increased in the first half of the year compared with the beginning of the year, with the highest increase of 40%.

Among these 14 companies, the highest increase in accounts receivable is Ruifeng Optoelectronics (300241, SZ), a company with revenue of 294 million yuan in the first half of the year, with accounts receivable reaching 163 million yuan, an increase of 40.20% over the beginning of the year.

The accounts receivable of Zhouming Technology (300232, SZ) also increased greatly. At the beginning of the year, the data was 107 million yuan, and the data published in the semi-annual report increased to 146 million yuan, an increase of 35.67%.

The smallest increase was Lianjian Optoelectronics (300,269, SZ), and the data at the end of the first half of the year was 245 million yuan, with an increase of only 0.95%. However, from the comparison of operating income, the company’s operating income in the first half of the year was 254 million yuan, almost equal to accounts receivable. Financial risks are specifically mentioned in the company’s key risk tips, saying that the company’s accounts receivable scale is growing, and accounts receivable occupy a large amount during the reporting period. Excessive accounts receivable increase the occupation of working capital, which is not conducive to the improvement of operating efficiency, and may also lead to bad debts and make the company suffer losses.

According to the statistics of national business daily, the total accounts receivable of these 14 companies reached 5.12 billion yuan, while the opening balance was 4.294 billion yuan, an increase of 19.24% in half a year.

On the one hand, the money owed to others is increasing, and on the other hand, the money owed to others is also increasing. Among the 14 key LED companies, accounts payable of 10 companies have increased, and the growth rate of individual companies has even reached several times.

The biggest growth rate is Huacan Optoelectronics (300323, SZ). The company’s accounts payable was 58 million yuan at the beginning of the year, and soared to 203 million yuan in the first half of the year, with an increase of 251.01%. According to the company, the increase in accounts payable is mainly due to the increase in equipment payment before the payment date.

Overall, the total accounts payable of 14 companies at the beginning of the year was 2.897 billion yuan, and by the end of the first half of this year, this figure had increased to 3.343 billion yuan, an increase of 15.40%.

Analysts pointed out that although, generally speaking, the corresponding receivables and payables will increase correspondingly after the scale of an enterprise becomes larger, if both of these data show a large increase, or the proportion of receivables in operating income is too large, we should be particularly alert to the problem of triangular debts in the industry.