---
title: "Owing Suppliers, Founders Sidelined, Mass Layoffs: What's Happening with Dianshang Hulian?"
description: "Recently, a reader tipped off New Distribution that Dianshang Hulian, a well-known B2B platform, was involved in a female employee's suicide attempt due to unpaid wages. Prior to this, the company had faced multiple issues including branch closures, unpaid supplier debts, sidelined founding team, and mass layoffs."
author: "新经销团队"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2018-04-21"
language: "en"
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# Owing Suppliers, Founders Sidelined, Mass Layoffs: What's Happening with Dianshang Hulian?

> Recently, a reader tipped off New Distribution that Dianshang Hulian, a well-known B2B platform, was involved in a female employee's suicide attempt due to unpaid wages. Prior to this, the company had faced multiple issues including branch closures, unpaid supplier debts, sidelined founding team, and mass layoffs.

Recently, a reader tipped off New Distribution that Dianshang Hulian, a well-known B2B platform, was involved in a female employee's suicide attempt due to unpaid wages. Prior to this, the company had faced multiple issues including branch closures, unpaid supplier debts, sidelined founding team, and mass layoffs.

01
**Unpaid Wages for Months, Female Employee Suicide Attempt**
**Based on the reader's tip to New Distribution, we obtained the following information on a workplace app:**
On the app, two users verified as former employees of Dianshang Hulian also commented, confirming that unpaid wages were indeed true.
We immediately sought confirmation from a friend who previously worked at Dianshang Hulian, further verifying the authenticity of the incident, and received the following response:
He also revealed to New Distribution that at the end of March, Dianshang Hulian had forced employees to resign, retaining only a few staff to handle aftermath. The two months of owed wages would only be paid at 80%, with payment scheduled for April 20. However, the relevant person in charge at Dianshang Hulian is currently unreachable.
At the layoff meeting at the end of March, the staff responsible for the layoffs told everyone they only had two days to complete resignation procedures because "the funds in the pool must be used to repay supplier debts and settle employee wages." This meant that if resignation procedures were delayed, employees might not receive their wages at all.
**The specific recording is as follows:**

02
**Numerous Internal Management Issues**
As early as last year, Dianshang Hulian was exposed for owing supplier accounts, directly leading to the closure of several regional branches.
In earlier media reports, a brand supplier told reporters that Dianshang Hulian initially settled payments twice a week, but from the second half of 2017 began "discounted" settlements, e.g., paying only 50,000 or 70,000 yuan on a 100,000 yuan invoice. By November, no payments were made at all, and the supplier was owed 240,000 yuan in total, while other suppliers in the same city were owed up to 600,000-700,000 yuan. Another supplier, owed 70,000 yuan, had gone to Dianshang Hulian's Beijing headquarters to negotiate and signed an agreement promising payment by April 2, but has yet to receive a cent.
Earlier this year, Dianshang Hulian announced a 350 million yuan Series B+ equity financing from Beijing Zhenru Investment Management Co., Ltd., but now no information about the investment can be found on Zhenru's official website.
**The founder of Dianshang Hulian had to admit the failure of the financing:**

03
**Reflections and Industry Concerns**
The broken capital chain reflects more of Dianshang Hulian's chaotic internal management, but this is by no means an isolated case. In the FMCG B2B industry, seizing market share through low prices is nothing new. Buying high and selling at cost or even at a loss is common. The direct consequence is that profits cannot cover warehousing, logistics, operations, and other costs. When capital cannot continuously provide support, problems are inevitable.
After Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com entered the market, early heavy investments became awkward. These internet giants invest their own profits, while VCs invest LP money, so their attitudes toward trial and error are fundamentally different. Thus, in the second half of 2017, few large investments entered the FMCG field; even platforms that were ahead and performing well found it hard to secure funding.
When VCs are hesitant to make large investments, relying on financing to survive becomes impossible for B2B entrepreneurs on this track. However, some B2B companies that expanded too quickly and haven't achieved self-sustaining cash flow will face a harsh winter; with too large a scale, they will soon run out of resources.
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. Self-sustaining cash flow is a reality every platform must face. This stage is the true test of a platform's operational capabilities.
But New Distribution has always believed that technology can empower the industry. Transforming the industry with technology requires significant investment and experimentation with various models. Trial and error itself is a barrier, and the overall efficiency improvement in the supply chain brought by technology is the ultimate core competitiveness of B2B.

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