Young managers: Long Weijun, Wuxi Baide

Established in 2008, Wuxi Baide is specialized in printing and processing of self-adhesive labels. Benefiting from the rapid development of the Chinese label market, Baide has developed into the largest professional label manufacturer in Wuxi City, a city close to Shanghai in Jiangsu province.

However, when it was first established, Wuxi Baide printed wide variety of products which included labels. After two years, I realized our company remained in the stage of being ‘content with small profits’, and lacked an independent brand and specialist equipment. This meant we suffered from hidden dangers, because a stable market position and customer loyalty could not be formed in the face of fierce competition.

We set about reforming the company and started to look at cost-effective business areas where we could avoid fighting with our peers. We locked in leading enterprises in food, household chemicals, energy and other industries as our customers, and actively filtered out customers with low value-added products and irregular orders. In this way, we concentrated more energy on those more valuable customers aligned with our development route.

To become an excellent label enterprise was our mission, our orientation and vision of general development. As we only undertook label converting, all our processing equipment related to labels to avoid expanding blindly and wasting resources. We began to specialize in label processing, so we had more energy and ability to look after product details and provide customers with more value-added options via efficient resource integration.

Wuxi Baide’s efforts were eventually recognized by the industry. At the beginning of 2015, Baide Label was listed in the Shanghai Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Equity Transaction Center and became the first private label printing enterprise to be publicly listed in China.

This public listing had epoch-making significance in the history of Wuxi Baide. Driven by the capital market, we accumulated more resources and public exposure. Wuxi Baide had become widely known and attracted more attention from upstream and downstream firms. After listing, many excellent enterprises and individuals came to visit our company. Some of them wanted to invest in Baide, and some highly talented people wanted to join us. Supported by new capital, we enhanced our investment in more flexible equipment including digital presses, inspection and finishing equipment.

Some think we have developed too rapidly, but in our opinion the difference between ‘rapid’ and ‘slow’ development is only relative. If you cannot cater for the speed this society is developing, you might consider it as ‘rapid’ development; but we are changing our ideas quickly to keep up with the pace of change – which is something different. In my opinion, printing is too traditional as an industry. Faster development is possible so long as you are in control and providing good quality, highly cost-effective products.

Everyone discusses the poor performance of the label printing industry in recent years – but why has Wuxi Baide grown so rapidly in these circumstances? Baide is the dark horse of the Chinese label industry. Our employees are very young and enthusiastic and have great potential. If a label converter fails to develop well, maybe it is related to the enterprise’s strategic planning and management ideas. The atmosphere and platform are created by the top leader of a company. I don’t like to be called ‘boss’. In fact, I’m only a platform creator. I lead employees to cooperate with each other. They only need to walk behind me to work hard. In Wuxi Baide, all employees are rewarded and respected only if they work hard. Also, they can obtain a shares in the company through their efforts.

My next mission is to expand the Wuxi Baide platform. Therefore, we established Jiangxi Baide Label Printing. Next, I plan to open more factories in China, building on new talent and resources to expand the Baide business. In addition, we decided to increase the ratio of international trade and expand into the global market.