Entrepreneurship
Introduction:
Our company's name is LZU-HS-China-C. We aim to solve the problem of superbugs that endangers human health and pollutes the environment. We believe through our passion and power, as a team, we could make the world better. Our company consists of two key components: both science and business team. The business team mainly focuses on planning our whole marketing process.
The product of our company is freeze-dried powder, which helps degrade sulfadiazine (SDZ) maintained in livestock manure. The whole process of producing the freeze-dried powder includes: cooling down engineering to a temperature lower than the freezing point, vacuum, and increasing temperature. The whole process kept requiring low prices. Therefore, the selling price of our product would be low. This benefits our company as we are planning to sell the freeze-dried powder to farmers who would not be willing to pay a high price for our product used for protecting the environment as they have a low level of knowledge.
About us:
Our company, LZU-China-C, makes innovation and progress in the livestock industry, focusing on creating a type of dry-freeze powder that can degrade sulfadiazine contained in animal feces.
The long-term misuse of antibiotics has resulted in high concentrations of antibiotic residues in animal feces. The feces will pollute the environment, posing a serious threat to human health. In our experiment, we used an extracellular expression technique to fix laccase 6 (lacc6) from Pleurotus ostreatus HAUCC 162 at the surface of the probiotic E. Coli Nissle 1917 (EcN) obtaining a recombinant strain, EcN-IL. This means that it is safe and green, and decreases our costs as well as energy consumption. Our goal is to ensure that our dry-freeze powder is affordable to the public so that farmers are willing to purchase our product and use it.
LZU-China-C's goal for the first three years is to thoroughly develop our market in Guangzhou and partner with companies that are in the fields of Synthetic Biology and livestock industry.
1). Bloomage BioTechnology Corporation Limited (华熙生物科技股份有限公司) Bloomage BioTech is one of the most successful biotechnology and bioactive materials companies in China. The company mainly focuses on the development and industrial application of functional sugars, proteins, polypeptides, amino acids, nucleotides, natural active compounds, and other biological actives that contribute to human health. By collaborating with Bloomage BioTech, we can better optimize our product, having a foothold in Synthetic Biology.
2). Bright Food Shang Hai Farm (光明食品集团上海农场有限公司) Shang Hai Farm is the largest government-owned farm in the Yangtze River Delta, mainly engaging in grain farming, pigs, aquatic products, eggs, and mushrooms. Hence, if we partner with Shang Hai Farm, we can benefit from having enough supplies (mushrooms) and building awareness and reputation.
LZU-HS-China-C will keep working on our research with the goals of saving the environment and ensuring the health of all people.
Product:
Our company LZU-HS-China-C is selling a type of freeze-dried powder, which could be used to degrade sulfadiazine (SDZ). It should be widely used by farmers who abuse antibiotics.
Three current methods could be used to degrade antibiotics, the Extraction method, the Fenton oxidation method, and the Aerobic activated sludge process. The biological method is used the most. However, three of them would cause second-time environmental pollution and are expensive Therefore, our team developed a new method. We created a recombinant strain and made it into freeze-dried powder in the factory.
Overall, the price is kept to be lower than another degrading method with a selling price of each box (5g*10 bags), 0.65 dollar/ box. Also, our product is easy to use and could bring goods (profit) to customers. Therefore, we believe we will have high sales with the 3 main advantages.
Target market:
Our target market in the early stage will be the local farmers. However, most of the farmers don't know the negative effects of antibiotics, so we will conduct fieldwork in the nearby rural areas through direct visits and talks to promote our product and gain awareness.
During the growing and early maturity stage, we will approach retail stores to sell our product. By doing so, we can reach a more extensive customer base, have greater sales potential, and provide a better experience with customers.
Lastly, we will sell our technology before we release our optimized second-generation freeze-dried powder to maintain our competitive advantage.
Cost and funding:
Start and capitalize
Probiotic freeze-dried powders would be the cheapest and most effective way to degrade sulfadiazine. There is a great demand in this market. For example, in Russia, New Zealand, and other countries, antibiotics are widely used as animal growth promoters, among which SDZ accounts for the majority. And about 60%-90% of sulfa antibiotics will be excreted with livestock manure, polluting the environment. Our company is committed to solving these kinds of problems. First, we will expect to produce 5 million boxes of probiotic lyophilized powder at 5g per box.
Strain production cost
The production cost of the strains is very low, only a dime of raw materials can grow 10 billion strains, and packaging technology and packaging costs are only 20 cents and a few cents respectively. Therefore, the cost of this part is negligible, which also lays the foundation for the high-cost performance of our products.
Labor cost
Since the raw materials are cheap and the technology of growing strains is mature, we will not have too much cost in the research and development of packaging and growing strains. In terms of labor costs, including management, worker production, and worker packaging, we need a large number of talents to improve product quality, efficiency, and team cohesion.
Label testing fees and patents
To protect our property rights, we will apply for a patent. At the same time, in order to make our products available to farmers large and small, we use part of our products for retail, so labeling and label testing are required.
Financial planning
Overview: This funding will be used for our further research and development, including improving product performance and production efficiency. Finally, we will use the money to advertise our products to the world and make our lyophilized powder a leading brand in the field.
1. In order to study big problems, develop products, find target customers and operate the market, we need to do a lot of research and research, and we will provide 500,000 US dollars as a research fee.
2. We will use $3,000 to apply for patents, including technology patents, trademark registration patents, and packaging patents, to protect our ideas.
3. $32 million will be used to improve lyophilized powder production technology. This is to optimize the manufacturing process, use raw materials efficiently and reduce the waste of raw materials in the manufacturing process. And the introduction of efficient production equipment to improve efficiency.
4. We will use $1 million to pay other expenses, including contingency costs and venue rental costs.
5. In order to hire leadership managers and experienced employees, $2 million will be spent on talent recruitment. (Management salaries are estimated to cost $100,000 per person/other employees are estimated to cost $20,000 per person)
6. The next part of our project will be a season of testing on a small scale on a medium-sized cattle farm. The results help us understand potential problems with the product so that we can make improvements. After the experimental improvement is completed, we will display our products in green environmental protection and bio-related exhibitions to attract more partners and customers. It will cost us $2 million.
Competitor analysis:
The freeze-dried powder is originally designed by our company. Therefore, we have fewer competitors in the same industry. However, we might be facing different competition due to the following reasons.
1. Manufacturers that sell degraded products at low prices. Because of the low level of knowledge of farmers, they ignore the problem of superbugs harming human health and the environment, and would not buy any degraded products without strict government requirements. They don't know how to measure the effectiveness of a product. For them, making a high profit is the priority. So they will only choose cheap degradable products to reduce the cost, to meet the requirements of the government.
2. Manufacturers that sell products that use simple degradation methods. Because the freeze-dried powder we developed needs to be used together with the digester. But the aim of farmers is simply to sell meat, milk, and so on for profit. Therefore, it will not take extra effort and time to collect livestock manure and transport it to the septic tank. They will only choose products that can help reduce labor and time costs.
3. A manufacturer that sells degradable products with a long shelf life. Due to the high concentration of freeze-dried powder, it can reach 200 to 300 billion CFU per gram. Therefore, use less each time. Although the freeze-dried powder we sell has a shelf life of 3 years. But farmers look for products with a longer shelf life to reduce costs by avoiding repeated purchases.
Barriers:
We are aware of the problem of brand recognition. Although the current methods of degrading antibiotics have lots of disadvantages compared to our new method. But people are more used to them and might not choose our method due to the potential risk it might have.
Moreover, biogas could be turned into electricity to run the septic tank. But the improper operation of biogas storage may lead to a septic tank explosion, which is extremely dangerous. Therefore, this problem is one of the main focuses of future development.
SWOT:
Reference
华熙生物科技股份有限公司（中国生物医药公司） https://baike.sogou.com Accessed 11 Oct. 2022.
光明食品集团上海农场有限公司https://aiqicha.baidu.com/detail/compinfo?pid=xlTM-TogKuTwOi3mqegHBJRwxZJs54erxQmd&rq=ef&pd=ee&from=ps Accessed 11 Oct. 2022.