关键词: 供应链金融, 再制造过程创新, 资金约束, 融资决策

Abstract: Driven by the carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals, remanufacturing can not only reduce carbon emissions but also reduce costs and increase profits. Therefore, manufacturers collect and remanufacture used products, and reduce the unit variable cost of the remanufactured product through process innovation for remanufacturing to increase their economic benefits. A series of initial investments, designs, and work in the phase of making used products easy to be collected and reducing unit remanufacturing costs are called process innovation for remanufacturing. For example, Fuji Xerox intentionally has added a disassembly design during the design and production of the copier to ensure that the collected products could be reused and remanufactured as much as possible, thereby significantly saving the remanufacturing cost. These designs do not increase the production costs of new products, but bring great convenience to the collection and remanufacturing of second-hand products. However, if manufacturers choose to remanufacture themselves, they need to consider both producing new products and remanufacturing products, which requires significant funds and investment in equipment. The manufacturer may have insufficient funds and difficulties in completing retailers’ orders, thereby affecting the better development of the supply chain. Therefore, our research is motivated by how a capital-constrained manufacturer chooses the optimal financing modes under process innovation for remanufacturing and different remanufacturing strategies.
Based on the process innovation for remanufacturing, we consider three manufacturer-led Stackelberg game models: one without financing, another with bank financing, and still another with retailer financing. The manufacturer can adopt three different remanufacturing strategies: a strategy without remanufacturing, one with partial remanufacturing, and one with full remanufacturing. We use the Kuhn-Tucker conditions in nonlinear programming to solve the three models and obtain the optimal decisions and profits of the manufacturer and retailer in all three strategies of remanufacturing. Firstly, we consider a benchmark model for the manufacturer without capital constraint. By constructing the Lagrange function of the expected profit of the retailer, we use the Kuhn-Tucker conditions to obtain the optimal response function of the retailer. Then, according to the retailer’s response functions, we again construct the Lagrange function of the manufacturer’s expected profit function and obtain the optimal decisions and profits of the manufacturer and the retailer under the three remanufacturing strategies. Then, considering that the manufacturer has financial constraints, we construct the game models under two scenarios: one with bank financing and the other with retailer financing. Similarly, the optimal equilibrium solutions and profits of both parties in the supply chain under three different remanufacturing strategies are obtained based on the Kuhn-Tucker conditions. On this basis, we analyze the optimal financing strategies of the manufacturer and the financing preferences of the retailer and we verify the conclusions through numerical simulations. Furthermore, we further analyze the impact of the innovation level in process innovation for remanufacturing on the expected profits of the manufacturer and the retailer.
These results indicate that: (1)In the case of bank financing, the optimal interest rate of the bank should be the risk-free rate. (2)Under the bank financing and retailer financing modes, the manufacturer and retailer without remanufacturing strategy have the lowest expected profits and have the highest expected profits with full remanufacturing. Therefore, the capital-constrained manufacturer has an incentive to engage in remanufacturing. (3)Overall, regardless of which remanufacturing strategy the manufacturer adopts, the manufacturer prefers the retail financing mode in most cases, while the retailer prefers the bank financing. (4)As the level of process innovation for remanufacturing improves, the expected profits of the manufacturer in the bank financing and retailer financing modes decrease accordingly. In the full remanufacturing strategy, the manufacturer’s expected profits first increase and then decrease. What is more, the manufacturer’s expected profits under retail financing are always higher than those under bank financing.

Key words: supply chain finance, process innovation for remanufacturing, capital constraints, financing decisions