Abstract: Capital constraint plays a key role when it comes to managing firms’operations, particularly for enterprises with certain growth potential in the demand market. Evidence shows that many capital-constrained growth enterprises went bankrupt due to the incorrect choice of financing, for example, Luckin Coffee, which rapidly expanded in the consume market. Most of its retail divisions faced financial constraints and financing options when expanding a potential market, which greatly affected the development of Luckin Coffee. However, there are also enterprises such as Alibaba Group, Xiaomi Corporation, which have succeeded through adopting reasonable financing strategies in the process of market expansion. For example, “ele.me” in Alibaba Group quickly expanded the potential demand of food delivery service in catering market through financing. With the same business that expands the market through financing, why do some enterprises succeed while others fail? In addition, with the rapid development of platform economy and business ecosystem, and the success of businesses such as Alibaba and Xiaomi, there has been a certain degree of centralization between upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain. The operation structure of supply chain has gradually become more flexible, presenting an operational structure between complete decentralized and complete centralized, which affects the decision-making of enterprises in the supply chain. Therefore, to discover the reasons for such practices and give managerial insights into financing strategies in the context of market expansion, this paper investigates the financing issues faced by capital-constrained growth enterprise, particularly those of their financing equilibrium between bank credit financing and trade credit financing with the consideration of degree of centralization.
With respect to a two-echelon supply chain comprised of a core supplier and a capital-constrained retailer with a certain level growth potential, this paper analyzes the impact of retailer’s growth potential and supply chain’s degree of centralization on the optimal decision-making and debt financing equilibrium between bank credit financing and trade credit financing. By a Stackelberg game model, the study points out that: when the degree of centralization is low, the supplier’s (retailer’s) decision decreases (increases) with the degree of centralization. When the degree of centralization is high, the retailer’s decision decreases with the degree of centralization. In addition, thesupplier’s decisions under bank credit financing are discrete and affected by risk-free interest rate and the degree of centralization of supply chain. Under trade credit financing, the optimal wholesale price is unit retail price. Furthermore, the optimal financing strategy is always trade credit financing in our research framework.
To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to study capital-constrained retailer’s financing equilibrium under both bank credit financing and trade credit financing from the perspective of market growth potential. By using the classic Stackelberg game model, our research also gives several relevant managerial implications for the capital-constrained enterprises’ financing options in the context of growth market demand. First, market growth potential is a key factor that should be considered when the downstream enterprises finance from internal upstream core enterprises or external banks. Second, capital-constrained enterprises should choose financing through TCF from internal core enterprises in the context of market expansion.
There are some possible extensions to our current model. First, because of the lack of full information about the capital-constrained retailer, moral hazard arises, as retailers might divert credit to other projects (especially in bank credit financing). Second, the retailer sometimes has more precise knowledge about demand conditions. It is worthwhile analyzing the financing equilibrium in channels with such asymmetric information. Finally, our analysis points out the optimal financing strategies. However, this has not been studied empirically. Therefore, collecting industry evidence to demonstrate our theoretical findings comes as a future research priority.

Key words: supply chain finance, growth enterprise, debt financing, degree of centralization

摘要： 针对由上游一个核心供应商和其下游一个资金受限、但具备一定成长潜力的零售商组成的两级供应链,考虑介于完全独立和完全集中之间的供应链运营结构,以及债权融资中常见的两种融资策略:银行信用融资、商业信用融资,通过建立斯塔克尔伯格博弈模型,探讨了零售商的成长潜力和供应链上下游关联度对供应商和零售商融资决策的影响。研究指出,上下游关联度较低时,供应商的决策随关联度的上升而下降、零售商的决策随关联度的上升而上升;上下游关联度较高时,零售商的决策随关联度的上升而下降;此时,在银行信用融资下,供应商的决策是离散的,并主要受到关联度和银行授信利率的影响;在商业信用融资下,供应商的批发价格决策始终为单位产品市场售价。此外,考虑供应链关联度的成长型企业最优融资策略始终为商业信用融资。最后通过数值分析验证了结论。

关键词: 供应链金融, 成长型企业, 债权融资, 供应链关联度