Bankruptcy! Chinese coffee giant Hougu Coffee may withdraw from the historical stage forever

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Yesterday, the manager of the domestic coffee giant Hougu Coffee Co., Ltd. issued an announcement. According to the enterprise bankruptcy law of the people's Republic of China and relevant laws, Hougu Coffee voted on the restructuring plan (draft) of 25 enterprises, including Dehong Hougu Coffee Co., Ltd. The voting group is set up as follows: tax creditor's rights group, construction project creditor's rights group, social security creditor's rights group, employee creditor's rights group and so on. In the end, because the financial institutions group and the property-backed claims group did not agree with the restructuring plan, the Hougu Coffee restructuring Bill was not passed after a vote, which meant that the once-largest local coffee brand restructuring process could once again enter a dead end.

Company + farmer is a typical business combination of coffee, its basic operation mode is that farmers are responsible for planting and harvesting, while the company is responsible for purchasing, processing, processing into raw beans or cooked beans, or other product forms and selling them. Similar brands such as Hougu, Lingfeng and Starbucks are engaged in Yunnan producing areas. The highlight moment of Hougu Coffee manages more than 200000 mu of planting area and 300000 farmers, and its annual output of instant coffee powder is 33000 tons.

Back Valley Coffee may be a little strange to most people. Unless tourists who have been to Yunnan have a vague impression of the brand at Changshui Airport, or the Foreign Minister said, "it's not my exaggeration, it's the best coffee I've ever had all over the world." For this industry, Hougu Coffee was once a giant in the industry. It provided the raw materials of instant coffee for Nestle, McDonnell, Kraft and other major brands in the world, and then glued the packaging of these brands for sale. This business alone accounts for more than 60% of the market share. According to public reports, even before the quagmire, Hougu Coffee had an annual income of 5.691 billion yuan in 2017, even in the current two years, under the strong demand of the coffee market, Hougu Coffee has maintained a good momentum in terms of sales business alone.

Whether it's the coffee industry itself, or for the company itself, this used to seem like a good business story. From 2010 to 2012, the price of coffee beans in Yunnan was as high as 40 yuan / kg due to Brazilian rust, and then fell back to the range of 13-17 yuan in the following years. This wave of rising market makes Hougu Coffee into the fast lane of development, constantly buying land to expand projects, Hougu Finance has become unbearable or precisely related to the story is too good.

In 2018, it was reported that Hougu Coffee had cash flow difficulties, resulting in a debt crisis. In 2019, Hougu, who could not afford to pay back the money, began to be sued by banks. In April last year, Hougu had to start looking for new investors to take over the restructuring, and according to the restructuring draft announcement, Hougu Coffee had a total debt of 11.5 billion yuan and 637 creditor representatives eligible to vote in the restructuring plan. this scale is larger than the number of employees in most private enterprises.

I saw him rise from a tall building, saw him entertain guests, and saw his building collapse. Xiong Xiangren, chairman of Hougu Coffee, not only borrowed heavily to turn Hougu Coffee into a star enterprise in Yunnan, but also sent himself to prison. At the beginning of this year, a judgment on the Chinese referee website let the outside world see a small microcosm of the story, and also let the outside world know how Xiong Xiangren has been silenced for several years. The criminal verdict released details of Hougu Coffee and Chairman Xiong Xiangren's conviction of unit bribery, in which the leaders of two branches of state-owned banks were involved. they were Dai Shihong, former president of the Yunnan Branch of the Export-Import Bank of China, and Zhou Dong, former party committee member and vice president of the Yunnan Branch of the Bank of Communications.

The judgment of the first instance shows that from 2012 to 2018, Xiong Xiangren, for the benefit of the company, failed to pay off the maturing debts, had a poor credit situation, had a high asset-liability ratio, and did not have the conditions for financing and loans. in order to obtain financial support and upgrade the credit rating and loan line of Hougu Coffee, he successively paid bribes to many people totaling 51.72924527 million yuan. Among them, the amount of money involving two leaders of the Yunnan branch of state-owned banks exceeded 21 million.

Among them, during the period from 2015 to 2018, Xiong Xiangren, under the condition of poor credit situation, high asset-liability ratio, and lack of loan conditions, took the non-performing loans of the Import and Export Bank Yunnan Branch as the condition to upgrade the credit rating and loan line of Hougu Coffee to obtain high loans, and successively gave Dai Shihong and his lover Zhang a total of about 21.3792 million yuan, of which 18.4 million yuan was given after being asked for bribes. In this judgment of first instance, the court found that Hougu coffee offender was fined 5 million yuan for bribery, while Xiong Xiangren was also sentenced to two years' imprisonment and a fine of 500000 yuan for the same crime.

Many years ago, the French missionary Tian Deneng brought coffee trees to the village of Jugula to take root and sprout through the Yunnan-Vietnam railway. At the time of in the last century, Tian Deneng's first generation of coffee trees basically died out because of frost and ice. Xiong Xiangren carved one of them into a root carving in his office as a decoration. He may not have thought at that time that he had also become a part of the Yunnan coffee story, and where the post-valley would go would have to wait for another vote.

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