Printer aims to become an Uber

Chinese people have become comfortable with the sharing economy in their daily lives, with apps like Uber and Airbnb providing lots of convenience.

Now the head of China's largest C2M, or customer to manufacturer, printing company says she would like to extend the sharing economy concept to the enterprises, to in essence be the Uber for them.

"Thousands of manufacturers are just like taxies while enterprises need procurement like passengers, and we are going to provide the platform to link them, allowing enterprises to find quality printing products and services at a reasonable price in no time," says Zhang Hongmei, CEO of Easy Print (www. 98ep.com).

Set up in 2011, Easy Print just received a 350 million yuan ($52 million; 47 million euros) investment from SoftBank and Fosun, two leading venture capital and private equity firms. This marks the company's third round of financing after its establishment.

The money will be mainly used to establish a solid technology platform to standardize our process and services, attract talent and do more marketing, Zhang says.

"But we don't have a plan for a listing in the short term. We just want to get ready for when the window for the listing comes," she says.

The company's gross profit has remained around 15 percent, which is much higher than most e-commerce platforms, Zhang says.

The key to such a comparatively high profit margin is selling mostly custom products instead of standard products.

"Our sales revenue saw eightfold growth in 2015 to 500 million yuan. And we plan to have our sales exceed 10 billion yuan within two to three years," Zhang says.

The gross annual value of China's printing industry exceeded 1 trillion yuan in 2013 for the first time, making it the world's second-largest printing market after the United States, industry data show. But the printing market in China is highly scattered, and most companies are small.

"Though China's market has huge potential, we had an overseas expansion plan at the very beginning, because we are committed to becoming a global company in the future," Zhang says.

The company currently does business in the US and UK. "We prefer organic growth instead of mergers and acquisitions in overseas markets because management after a M&A is very challenging."

Ren Jie contributed to this story.

huyuanyuan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 07/15/2016 page25)