In January 2020 Alan Coughlan arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada from his base of operations in the UK. It was his first trip to Silver State. The Cork native had no real contacts in the area. Within five days, he hired two staff members and rented a 5,000sq ft (565sq m) warehouse, his company’s first outside China.
The logic behind the decision was simple enough.
“We’re growing so fast with fulfilment out of China,” he recalls over the phone from Dubai, his bolt-hole for the past two years. “If we can offer this service in the States, we can get your products from the factory, store your goods in China and get globally from China to Europe and the rest of the world. But [the] USA is our biggest market. So if we can store a percentage of our stock in the States and you get faster delivery times. Your goods can be delivered in three to four days.”
If it was an object lesson in how Coughlan likes to do business – moving quickly, even frantically, when an opportunity has been spotted – it is also an example of some of the pitfalls of his line of work. He returned to Nevada the following March to oversee the arrival of the first shipment of goods from China. “We received our first batch on, let’s say, a Tuesday. Tuesday evening, I received an email from British Airways saying you have 24 hours to leave the country or you’ll be stuck there for six months.”
It would be two years before Coughlan could return to the warehouse. In the meantime, the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, upending international trade as governments scrambled to roll out public health measures in a frenetic effort to contain the virus. Port blockages and soaring shipping costs – due, in part, to a shortage of freight containers – rippled through global supply chains. All of this was compounded by a consumer spending boom that further stretched already creaking lines of supply as bored, stuck-at-home shoppers took to online ordering en masse.
I was sitting at the breakfast table one day. My dad just said, why don’t you look into going to China? And I said, I will. Within three months I was in China
— Alan Coughlan
It was a crazy time for anyone in the logistics business. “It probably took two years off my life,” says Coughlan, whose self-deprecating, dry sense of humour easily bridges the distance between Dubai and Dublin. “I was up all night and all morning. I was living in the UK at the time and so I’d wake up at about 4am to be on China time to have most of the day with China. Then I’d take about an hour nap and then the US comes on online and be up till 2am. So I was sleeping like three hours a day, including the nap.”
At the same time, however, Lansil Global – the ecommerce business he founded in China in 2015 – was growing rapidly and his services were in high demand. Coughlan’s decision to expand into the US proved to be well timed and when China began to lift restrictions, his order volumes spiked. ”We went from $19 million [€17.5 million] a year in revenue the year before to $40 million [€37 million] that year.” He hopes to get to $100 million (€92.5 million) over the next couple of years, he says, having recently opened a second warehouse on the east coast of the US.
Hong Kong-headquartered Lansil, which celebrated its ninth birthday earlier this month, has shipped and delivered around half a billion worth of goods over its lifetime, by its own estimates, filling around 15 million orders from its warehouses in China and the US. It employs around 110 people in the world’s two largest economies. In the driver’s seat sits Coughlan, an accidental entrepreneur if ever there was one.
An average student by his own admission, he received his undergraduate degree in business from Cork Institute of Technology in 2011, despite failing his first year. “I got a 2:2,” he recalls. “So there weren’t many options for me to do a master’s in Ireland. You probably need a 2:1 minimum.”
He certainly wasn’t champing at the bit to join the corporate world or set up a business himself. His father, Oliver Coughlan, has had a long career as an executive, most recently serving as group chief executive of Denis O’Brien’s Digicel before his retirement last year. But Alan was unsure whether wanted to move in that direction himself and, besides, with the Irish economy mired in a deep recession, his options were limited.
Then came a fateful conversation with his father.
“I was sitting at the breakfast table one day. My dad just said, why don’t you look into going to China? And I said, I will. Within three months I was in China. I had no other choice really. I wanted to continue my studies even though it’s not what I was good at. But I wasn’t ready to start working then. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
Eventually, Coughlan would end up meeting his future wife and living in China for another five years after he completed his studies. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I absolutely loved it. And it put me out of my comfort zone.”
When the production was finished about two and a half, three months later, I went to check the quality and the quality was terrible. I failed in selling those goods online
— Alan Coughlan
It was also where he got the idea for Lansil. “I was teaching English part-time and learning Chinese on the side,” he says. “And again, going back to my study days, I wasn’t putting the effort into it because I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” Fed up with teaching, he began visiting factories with the vague notion of setting up some kind of import-export business. “I went to a few factories, loved the process and thought I could buy some stuff and sell it back home.”
His first order was for a set of bicycles he planned to sell at home in Ireland. It proved to be something of a false start but a fruitful one. It planted the seeds for what would become Lansil.
“I went to a factory myself in Shanghai, the city where I was living,” he says. “When the production was finished about two and a half, three months later, I went to check the quality and the quality was terrible. I failed in selling those goods online. Even after doing five years of business school, I had no idea about online marketing.
“Then I thought, well if I had these quality issues and I’m living in China, if somebody was ordering online from Alibaba, trusting in these factories, and then the goods are shipped, they’d only find out when the goods arrive in the USA or UK or Ireland via freight that there’s an issue.”
The idea initially was to set up a company that could link sellers who buy their goods from online marketplaces to factories in China, acting as a middleman to check the quality before forwarding them on to their destination. The only problem is Coughlan didn’t have any customers, investors or even employees.
Lansil’s first bit of business was for a payments company in Myanmar that wanted to bulk buy office supplies from China. “It kind of took off from there, but that contract only lasted for six months. After that, there was just silence.” He began cold calling online sellers, offering to travel to factories on their behalf to do quality checks. It was a hectic time for Coughlan, who was visiting three factories a day using only public transportation to get around.
“Luckily, some Amazon seller got back to me,” he recalls. “And I helped save his business money and improve his quality on one purchase order. He told someone else and the business just began to grow by word of mouth.
It wasn’t much but it was enough to convince Coughlan to take a lease on a 1,000sq ft (93sq m) office and warehouse in Shenzhen, China. “That allowed us to – rather than me going on the quality check, to check the products on behalf of my customer – the factory would send us the products to my little warehouse right where we would quality check the goods. They’re saving us time.”
Complicating all of this, however, was the fact that Coughlan had just moved to the UK where his wife, a doctor, had got a job with the NHS. “The first five years of my business I was just jet-lagged”, he says, recalling his trips back and forth to China. “I felt like I was living in airports and out of suitcases. Then one time, I got upgraded to business class on the way home, luckily. That almost saved my business because I was like that’s what I’m working for. It was a year or almost two years at that stage of grinding it out and it’s not working and then you get this little perk.”
Mercifully, the globe-trotting Coughlan has significantly cut down on his travel time since the birth of his son. And when he does move around to visit his operations in the US or China, he can now afford better seats. He and his wife put down roots in Dubai two years ago, a decision he says he is glad he made. “After lockdown, Dubai just appealed to both myself and my wife,” he says. “For me that the time difference between here and China is great. I lived there for five or six years and I don’t want to go back there again.”
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Coughlan is, however, fond of China and its people, even if they were a bit bemused when tried to explain his business idea initially. “I’d be really pissed off leaving meetings,” he says. “They would be like: Your customer is just going to come to us directly after you get this deal. They were kind of laughing at me. The Chinese are very open and blunt. Like if I put on weight or anything, when I go back to my office, they’ll tell me straight up.”
In addition to its original function, Lansil now offers customers more basic fulfilment services, holding stock on behalf of its customers and shipping out orders daily. This service precipitated Coughlan’s big push into the US where he now operates two warehouses, one in Nevada and one in Pennsylvania, with plans to open more in the foreseeable future.
With tensions high and a contentious election cycle on the horizon that is likely to put Sino-US relations squarely in the spotlight, it would be natural for someone in Coughlan’s position to be anxious about the coming months. He is, however, relatively sanguine about it. “I don’t really get involved in the politics,” he says. “We do about $40 million [€37 million] in revenue a year. We’re not a major player. We don’t set trends. We live and die on our customers’ online sales.”
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, “a lot of people were saying it’s the end with all these tariffs and duties”, says Coughlan. “For those two, three years, my business doubled each year.”
For Coughlan’s part, he doesn’t think commercial realities will allow for a significant ratcheting up of trade tensions between the two superpowers. “I can’t see them stopping goods coming from China because if you think of it, then Amazon is gone. No other country manufactures at the rate that China does at the moment.”
Coughlan has, however, seen the impact of China’s recent economic slowdown first-hand. “We’ve seen it on the purchasing side,” he says. “I know a lot of factory owners and my team speaks to a lot of them. Business is down from last year. A lot of factories are closing around China. The orders are not coming in from the US and Europe ... because online sales are lower globally compared with last year and the year before.”
That said, he thinks China’s position as the world’s factory is secure for the time being, despite the growing appeal of southeast Asian countries like Vietnam.
As for Lansil, Coughlan has big plans for the near future. But does Ireland feature in them? “My next step would be a European warehouse,” he teases. However, given that most of his customers are in the US and China, Ireland would not – “unfortunately”, he says – be a great location for that. “But it’s definitely a goal of mine, to have an office in Ireland that could be a point of contact for new customers or European customers.”
It doesn’t sound like a homecoming is on the cards in the near future.
Name: Alan Coughlan
Age: 36
Family: Married with one son
Lives In: Dubai, UAE
Hobbies: Working and playing with his son
Something you might expect: He plans on opening more warehouses globally over the next few years
Something that might surprise: He failed his first year of business in college
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