That day, sitting in the conference room, staring at a set of perfectly normal positive numbers on the financial report, I suddenly realized a bizarre truth: the company’s profits were rising, yet we were about to lay people off. Not minor tweaks, but a full-fledged “slimming campaign.”

The data was fine. The business was fine. Customer orders were even higher than last year. But management’s mood was tense, and the investors’ tone was cold: growth wasn’t fast enough.

It took me a while to understand that many actions within a company aren’t taken for current revenue, but to appease something as abstract as a phantom, yet decisive for survival—future expectations.

From an operational perspective, a growth slowdown is just a change in pace. But from a capital perspective, it’s an alarm. Profit is reality; growth is the future. Capital never looks at reality; it’s inherently obsessed with the future. If the future dims even slightly, capital suspects you can’t keep running.

Capital doesn’t buy what you earn now, but whether you can earn faster later. This reminds me of Marx’s almost brutally precise phrase: capital is “value in process,” value that begets value. Meaning, if it can’t grow faster and faster, it’s like a creature being choked—it suffocates.

A growth slowdown is capital’s suffocation. Even if profits keep rising, as long as they “aren’t rising fast enough,” capital becomes anxious and pressures management into action. These actions may be lackluster from an operational standpoint, but they are crucial in the narrative of capital. Layoffs are exactly that kind of action.

Essentially, it’s not about saving money. It’s about telling the capital market: we are saving ourselves, we are accelerating, we are willing to sacrifice. Layoffs are a letter of credence that executives hand to capital, an inevitable plot point in the capital narrative. If you don’t cut, you aren’t “acting”; if you don’t act, you aren’t “repairing expectations”; without repaired expectations, stock prices, valuations, and financing capacity all collapse together.

I later understood why some managers of profitable companies act like they’re sitting on a volcano—they aren’t serving the business; they’re serving the market cap. That’s the brutal reality.

Sometimes, seeing colleagues who did good work being forced to leave leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

But once growth slows down and the per-person efficiency model is recalculated, the organization’s size immediately becomes “over-allocated.” Not because people suddenly became useless, but because the “future revenue space” they correspond to is deemed to have shrunk. In the capital system, the value of labor isn’t about how well you perform now, but whether you can support the future “growth story.”

Simply put, your value doesn’t depend on what you did yesterday, but on whether you can contribute imagination space to that “bigger story” tomorrow. This is why many companies lay off employees even when profits hit record highs—profit isn’t the trigger for layoffs; expectations are.

It was around that time that I re-evaluated companies like Pangdonglai. It never tells a story for the capital market, never pursues that “explosive” growth. Its curve is more like tree rings—thick, solid, growing slowly, but never contracting.

Pangdonglai doesn’t need layoffs to repair its story because it doesn’t live by stories. It doesn’t treat employees as replaceable costs but as sources of value. This approach, seemingly “anti-capitalist,” has allowed the company to carve out a remarkably stable growth trajectory.

Marx wrote in Das Kapital that surplus value originates from “living labor.” When workers re-appropriate the surplus they create, the subjectivity of labor is activated. I think Pangdonglai has inadvertently flipped that switch.

Ultimately, when a company depends on capital, it must accept capital’s logic: speed trumps facts, expectations outweigh reality.

The world of capital isn’t a world of reason; it’s about trends, emotions, visions, and valuations. None of these can be stabilized by profit alone. Even if you earn a billion this year, if capital thinks you’ll only earn 1.1 billion next year instead of 1.5 billion, you’re in trouble. That expectation gap directly impacts the denominator of the valuation model, compressing your imagination space for the next decade in one go.

The longer you stay in a company, the more you realize a cruel but true question: who does the company exist for?

If a company chooses to exist for capital, then a growth slowdown is original sin, and layoffs are the way to atone. If a company chooses to exist for people, a growth slowdown might be an opportunity to build long-term value and stabilize internal accumulation.

Two paths, two destinies.

Capital drives companies to run at high speed, and the price of that high-speed run is that you can’t afford to slow down. For many companies, this is an inescapable fate.

But some companies choose a different path—not competing on stories, not racing for speed, just focusing on value itself. Such companies may not run the fastest, but they often last the longest.

I’m not naive enough to think every company can become a Pangdonglai. The structure of capital is as deep as the ocean; trying to rewrite it is like dismantling a tank with bare hands.

But I at least hope more managers understand: layoffs are not an inevitable law of business operations; they are a reflexive action of the capital world. When we discuss layoffs, we aren’t discussing “efficiency,” but “what the company believes in.”

Every company must eventually make a choice between speed and value. This choice determines how it views a growth slowdown, and how it treats people.

Today, I walked past that row of desks again. The computer was still on, the screen showing his unfinished weekly report. The last line read: “Q4 target achievement rate: 60%. Recommend team stability, consolidate the foundation.” I stared at that line for a long time.

Some truths, capital cannot hear, and does not want to hear.