What Counts as Valid Spending of Trade Union Funds: Fushangyun Turns Compliance into a Welfare Platform

I. The pain point lies not in demand but in compliance: how can trade union funds be spent in a valid manner

The market size of corporate welfare is not small. From 2023 to 2025, the domestic corporate welfare market has exceeded 1.7 trillion yuan, with the penetration rate of flexible welfare standing at about 65%. Compared with the 92% level in Europe and America, there is theoretically nearly 30% of room for growth.

However, what really restricts this industry is not demand, but compliance. There are clear specifications for the use of trade union funds: what can be purchased, what cannot be purchased, how to issue invoices, and whether the accounts can withstand audits are all hard constraints. For state-owned enterprises, this clause is often a one-vote veto item in bidding documents — if suppliers cannot provide complete compliance plans and audit statements, they will not even be eligible to bid.

This has led to a long-term mismatch between the supply and demand sides. Traditional welfare suppliers have customer relationships, but lack systematic capabilities: demands are collected manually, procurement is uniformly packaged, distribution relies on manual labor, and employees cannot decide what they receive; the advantage is that they are familiar with the process, while the disadvantage is that neither data can be accumulated nor compliance statements can be supported. General e-commerce platforms, on the contrary, have rich commodities and mature fulfillment capabilities, but they do not undertake the compliance review, budget management and targeted invoicing of trade union funds, which leads to constant mismatches in the corporate reimbursement process.

Zhu Zhimin, General Manager of Guangdong Fushangyun Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Fushangyun"), has worked in the supply chain e-commerce field for nine years and has long been connected with various trade union customers. He saw exactly this gap: a flexible welfare SaaS platform that not only understands the regulatory rules of trade union funds but also can control the supply chain independently was once a blank in South China. In 2023, the team decided to build one by itself — using self-developed SaaS superimposed on its own supply chain to create a welfare mall that allows employees to choose independently and supports full-process audit.

This choice means giving up part of the expansion speed. For every new customer, a round of customized compliance plan needs to be made first, which is more heavyweight than standardized SaaS; on the contrary, once the review is passed, customers need to go through the IT and compliance processes again if they want to change suppliers, leading to an extremely low churn rate.

II. Business model: Gift cards manage cash flow, the mall manages profits, and compliance manages access permission

Fushangyun's platform capabilities can be divided into three layers. The bottom layer is the compliance engine, which productizes the usage rules of trade union funds

and automatically generates supporting audit statements; the middle layer is the SaaS management backend, which is connected with corporate OA and HR systems, and supports distribution by department, shift and budget; the upper layer is the e-commerce mall, where employees can select commodities within the budget, and the fulfillment is completed by the company's supply chain directly connected with brand owners.

The three layers of capabilities correspond to three revenue streams with staggered paces. Gift cards are the cash flow entry: enterprises make centralized procurement according to the annual budget and pay first before receiving goods, contributing 53.49 million yuan in the 2025 fiscal year, accounting for 63% of revenue, which is equivalent to providing the company with an interest-free operating fund. The mall is the profit pool, generated by employees' independent redemption, with a gross commodity margin of 15%-25%, contributing 31.73 million yuan in the same period, accounting for 37%. The third revenue stream is the annual enterprise subscription fee, which covers customer success and system maintenance costs. If any one stream fluctuates, the other two can hedge the impact.

The profit improvement of the mall line can best illustrate the situation. In the 2025 fiscal year, the mall's profit margin rose from 7.73% to 14.29%, an increase of 657 basis points in one year; in the same period, the order volume rose from 138,000 to 351,000, while the customer unit price remained stable at 90.3 yuan (92.1 yuan in the previous year). The volume rises while the price does not, and the profit can still double, which indicates that the profit comes from removing intermediate links by directly connecting with brand owners and adjusting the product category structure, rather than squeezing profit out of price increases.

The target users are also very clear: institutions with a large number of employees, rigid welfare budgets and high compliance requirements. Guangzhou Public Transport, Guangzhou Metro, Industrial Control Group, China Life, and Honda are all on the list, belonging to three completely different industry lines of public transport, manufacturing, and finance and insurance. The compliance pain points of the three types of customers are different — public transport and metro customers have scattered outlets and strict supervision of trade union funds, manufacturing customers have shift-based employees with special distribution rhythms and redemption time periods, and finance and insurance customers need standardized procurement across national branches and have a complete access system for qualification and data security. The fact that the same set of platform can serve all of them at the same time shows that the product adaptability is not achieved by simply piling up manpower.

III. Progress and verification: From 18 large projects to 480 large projects, the growth engine has switched from acquiring new customers to expanding value per project

The project was launched in 2023, and 18 projects were completed in the same year to verify the model and run through the business closed loop. In the following two years, it maintained a doubling or higher expansion every year: 264 projects in 2024 and 480 projects in 2025, with a 27-fold increase in two years. In the 2025 fiscal year, the platform's cumulative revenue reached 85.22 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 129%; the profit increased from 9.8 million yuan to 45.4 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 362%. While the revenue doubled, the profit margin rose synchronously, and revenue and profit changed in the same direction.

A set of deviated data can better illustrate the situation. In 2025, 111,000 new registered users were added, with a year-on-year increase of only 32%, while the gift card revenue increased by 115%. The bifurcation of the two curves points to the same conclusion: the growth momentum is no longer the scale of registration, but the realization depth of the welfare budget of stock users. The gift card ARPU increased from 295 yuan in 2024 to 481 yuan, an increase of 63%; the output of gift cards per project increased from 94,000 yuan to 111,000 yuan, and the total revenue per project increased from 142,000 yuan to 178,000 yuan. While the number of projects doubled, the single-point output is still increasing, and the scale expansion has not diluted efficiency. By the end of the 2025 fiscal year, the platform had 264,000 cumulative registered users.

This kind of "increasingly thick operation" comes from the fifth link. The team splits the service process into five steps: customer acquisition, compliance review, plan customization, fulfillment and delivery, and renewal and order expansion. The first four steps determine whether customers can be onboarded, and the fifth step determines how much business can be expanded. In 2025, 25% of the increment of a single project mainly came from the renewal and category expansion of existing customers, and the customer acquisition cost was close to zero.

Customer feedback also focuses on two aspects. An administrative person in charge of a state-owned enterprise said that in the past, it took half a month to count demands and organize distribution every time welfare was distributed, but now the full-process distribution can be completed by importing the employee list, and the automatically generated compliance audit statement directly meets the audit requirements of trade unions, reducing the administrative labor cost by more than 70%. Shift employees of manufacturing customers mentioned another detail: in the past, the uniformly distributed rice, flour, oil and grain were inconvenient to carry, and they often missed the collection time, but now they can select commodities independently and have them delivered to their homes.

This round of financing also points to the same direction. Fushangyun plans to raise 20 million yuan and transfer 20% of its equity. The use of funds has been clearly planned: 7 million yuan for sales and customer success, 5 million yuan for supply chain and product selection, 4 million yuan for product and technology, 2 million yuan for compliance and qualification, and 2 million yuan for working capital reserve. 60% of the funds are planned to be invested in the sales and supply chain links that can directly drive the growth of the number of projects. The financing is still in progress.

If this round of funds is in place as planned, the target of gift card revenue in the 2026 fiscal year will be 100 million yuan, corresponding to a year-on-year growth rate of 87% — lower than the 115% already achieved in 2025. This target can be achieved through two paths: 800 projects × 125,000 yuan per project, or 897 projects × 111,000 yuan per project. The former relies on the simultaneous progress of sales replication and in-depth operation of stock customers, while the latter almost only relies on the natural growth of output per project. In terms of milestones, the number of managed projects will reach 650 in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year, and more than 800 by the end of the fiscal year

The gift card revenue will exceed 100 million yuan, and the mall profit margin will reach more than 15% in the 2027 fiscal year.

In the view of General Manager Zhu Zhimin, the team positions itself as an execution-oriented company rather than a concept-oriented one. "In the past three years, we have not exchanged scale for subsidies, and our growth mainly comes from the improvement of supply chain efficiency and the renewal and order expansion of customers." The next thing to do is also very specific: package the service model that has been verified by 480 projects into replicable benchmark cases, and promote it together with the sales team.