In many newspapers and magazines, the idea of Shanghai's centralized plate-making and decentralized box-making is called a classic solution to the future of cardboard factories. It indeed brought short-term profit margins and survival space for Shanghai's cardboard factories. However, I believe this is a dead end, and cardboard factories should be cautious.
1. Centralized plate-making and decentralized box-making lowers the investment threshold for cardboard factories and cultivates many unqualified cardboard suppliers, encouraging many improper marketing methods. Everyone knows that third-tier factories rely on this method to survive. The main survival marketing method of third-tier factories is high prices and high rebates. Without high prices, they have no room for survival; without high rebates, they wouldn't be able to secure satisfactory orders. My question is: How can such a marketing method cultivate a real market?
2. Centralized plate-making and decentralized box-making weakens the competitiveness of second-tier factories. Being preoccupied with the business of pulling paper plates, they neglect improvements in printing technology and fail to understand or investigate high-end customers. Both management methods and technical levels become increasingly unsuitable for market development as they grow more unfamiliar with the market.
3. Third-tier factories are not real customers and cannot create a stable customer base. Therefore, second-tier factories with a large number of third-tier factories face quite high operational risks. Third-tier factories lack production lines and are constrained by second-tier factories in terms of paperboard quality and timely delivery. Therefore, they cannot truly provide good service to customers, leading to poor customer stability. The disappearance of third-tier factory customers means the disappearance of second-tier factory customers. And because of their long-standing inability to establish the ability to serve terminal customers, they can only helplessly watch as customers flow to competitors.