Desert small fruits run out of super high speed, "farmland cloud spelling" to help Xinjiang small white apricots into a national large industry
At 10 p.m., the sky on the frontier was still bright, and the sun in Kuqa city was just about to set.
At the edge of a small white apricot orchard in Wucha Town, Kuqa City, Medina Ruzi, an e-commerce anchor of the Kuqa Mother Soil Forest Fruit Farmers Professional Cooperative, sat in the live broadcast room and was introducing xinjiang's unique small white apricots. Outside the apricot garden gate, a 9.6-meter-long SF express truck, loaded with more than 4,000 pieces of freshly packaged small white apricots, had to catch the last flight of the day and go directly to the homes of consumers in Beijing, Shanghai and other places.
Small white apricots, a small group of apricots that grow only in specific oases in the Tarim Basin. It is petite, white and yellow, and the flesh is crystal clear and pure and sweet. On June 17, at the "Duoduo Hi Fight Night" activity of "CCTV Finance x Pinduoduo", anchor Lu Jian directly called out that "Sun Wukong will be moved when he eats, the Eight Precepts of the Pig will shed tears when he eats, and the Tang monks will prolong their life when they eat." Because of its deliciousness, local Uighur villagers call it "Akkimisi", which means "white honey".
This small white apricot, known as the "king of apricots", tastes best in Kuqa City, which is produced on the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Kucha, known as "China's most beautiful highway", is the end of the Duku Highway that runs through the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains. The small white apricot produced here has been awarded the Geographical Indication of Agricultural Products by the Ministry of Agriculture. At the end of May every year, within a radius of 200 kilometers centered on Kuqa, hundreds of thousands of acres of small white apricot blossoms bloom and overflow with fragrance. The breeze blows the apricot tips and the stars are dense, dotting this oasis surrounded by the desert Gobi into a world of flowers.
In recent years, Xiaobai apricot has ushered in new friends.
Every year around the Dragon Boat Festival, the small white apricot enters the ripe season, and e-commerce practitioners from Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and other places create a "sweet feast" with local new farmers.
▲ In the packaging venue next to the small white apricot garden in Wucha Town, Kuqa City, local e-commerce anchor Medina Ruzi is broadcasting live through Pinduoduo to "produce and consume" the freshest small white apricot to 800 million consumers across the country. Zhou Lane | photo
Not every Kucha fruit farmer knows how to sell goods through e-commerce, but they really taste the sweetness brought by e-commerce. The most intuitive scene is that the donkey carts that were active in the intersection of Kucha Xiaobai Apricot Garden a few years ago have disappeared and been replaced by private cars. The fruit farmers opened their mobile phones, referred to the "opening of the market and sold explosive" market in their mobile phones, and talked about the small white apricot business.
Zero bad reviews perfect out of the circle: Pinduoduo set off a small white apricot "hijab"
Xinjiang is the largest apricot producing area in the country, with a planting scale of nearly 2 million mu, and small white apricots account for only one-tenth of them. Because it is located on the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert and its remote location, especially because the skin is thin and the meat is difficult to preserve, the small white apricot has long been "raised in the deep boudoir unknown".
In the memory of Yusupu Tohti, a sixty-year-old farmer in the town of Ucha, when he was a child, the little white apricot was part of the village life. Every year when spring comes, the snow-white apricot blossoms in the fields and behind the houses are amazing, which is the most unforgettable scenery of his childhood.
These beautiful apricot blossoms and delicious apricot fruits were the rare sweetness of the poor life in the countryside at that time. "When I was a child, I used to take my own small white apricots and dried apricots and hike more than ten kilometers to the rest area on the side of the national highway, and when the people who took the long-distance bus got off the bus to rest, they could buy a little." The old man Yusupu Tohti recalled that there were few cars on the road at that time, and fewer people were willing to get off the car to buy small apricots and dried apricots, and sometimes they could not sell one kilogram a day.
Later, foreign traders came to Kucha and every year they would buy dried apricots made by the old man Yusupu Tohti and sell them to the far mainland. But the fresh little white apricots still can't walk out of this desert oasis, and the vast outside world is unknown.
"Sweet! The skin is thin and too difficult to transport. The old man Yusupu Tohti said that the little white apricot is like this, delicious but also delicate.
Until more than a decade ago, there were finally traders from Urumqi who came to buy fresh small white apricots. Spanning 760 kilometers, the little white apricots arrived in batches in batches in the capital of this frontier province. Little white apricots are no longer just the spice of rural life, and they are beginning to play a bigger role.
However, no fruit farmer can really say clearly how many channels of transfer their own small white apricots have gone through, and at what price, how far have they been sold? Who are the people who buy apricots? A thick wall is always separated between The Kucha growers and the larger market.
Until recent years, the big market brought by the new e-commerce platform, together with the rapid development of frontier logistics, began to impact this "wall", and the people of Kucha began to do business throughout the country through the e-commerce platform.
▲ Direct origin + air logistics, so that consumers receive the freshest small white apricots, "tens of billions of subsidies" to help Xinjiang fruit farmers and consumers benefit at the same time. Zhou Lane | photo
In June 2020, the Xinjiang Learning Platform of "Learning to Strengthen the Country", Xinjiang Daily (Xinjiang New Media Center), and Kuqa Rong Media Center jointly launched a large-scale new media public welfare activity of "Taste of Xinjiang, Melon and Fruit Fragrance", and more than 1.7 million netizens participated in watching the live broadcast on the same day, curious about the "strange" little white apricot. During the event, nearly 6,000 orders were sent directly from the city of origin and shipped to all parts of the country.
Of the thousands of reviews of this event, all of them were positive. The small varieties in this deep alley began to sweeten the country. Pinduoduo's background data shows that the two repurchase rates of Xinjiang Xiaobai apricot are as high as 76%.
▲ Sweet taste and affordable price, so that Xinjiang small white apricot "zero bad evaluation" fire all over the country. Zhou Lane | photo
After the fission of consumer demand is gathered, the "farmland cloud spelling" model of directly connecting the production areas in the cloud helps xiaobai apricots enter the era of "becoming famous and known to the world". On the e-commerce platform, "Xinjiang Little White Apricot" has a boiling temperature. Kucha fruit farmers sighed, "It really sold to all of China." The hijab that covered the head of the little white apricot was finally lifted completely.
The origin is straight, and the small white apricot helps the fruit farmers to achieve a substantial increase in income
In 2020, Li Chengjun, a post-90s merchant, tried the online sales of small white apricots for the first time. But the two biggest selling points of the little white apricots, the thin skin and the sweet flesh, have become his two biggest difficulties. Thin skin means damage, and sweet meat means that it is not easy to preserve. Xinjiang Aksu Kucha small white apricot garden is more than 8,000 miles away from Shanghai and Zhejiang, and if you are not careful, the small white apricot may be scrapped.
Such a big difficulty, did not overwhelm Li Chengjun, he chose to reverse thinking: the more difficult, the greater the market space.
Li Chengjun and his partners repeatedly deduced the experiment together. From the carton with several layers of corrugated paper; a single small white apricot is packed in a plastic box, or with the EPE net sleeve package; the net sleeve is 3MM or 5MM; how much the packaging material weighs, whether it meets the logistics delivery standards; and even under different temperatures and humidity, how long can consumers save after receiving it, all fine calculations.
Li Chengjun's hard work was not in vain. In 2020, his fresh fruit fresh flagship store was listed on the top list of Pinduoduo small white apricot sales, and from June to July alone, more than 400 tons of small white apricots were sold in The Garage.
Kuchemu Tulinguo Farmers' Professional Cooperative leader Meat Zi Shawuti is Li Chengjun's partner. He said that the cooperative contracted to plant more than 2,000 acres of small white apricots, and the output of the entire picking season was more than 800 tons. In the past, it was necessary to wait for mainland bosses and agents to buy in the land, and when a large area matured, once it encountered bad weather, many buyers would deliberately reduce prices. The small white apricot skin is thin and sweet, and it is not tolerant to storage, and a fruit farmer like him can only earn less and sell it quickly.
Cooperative farmer Abulizi Turdi calculated a detailed account, the family has 5 acres of high-quality small white apricots, a picking season can harvest 2.4 tons of small white apricots, in the past in the trading market sold to vendors, the price of 15 yuan / kg, sold to vendors can get 36,000 yuan income. This year, the cooperative and Li Chengjun together in Pinduoduo "direct sales", consumers in the "tens of billions of subsidies" to buy small white apricots the price is 69 yuan / 4 pounds, aside from packaging, express delivery and loss costs, small white apricots can sell to 22 yuan / kg. Among the 2.4 tons of small white apricots, the high-quality apricots that meet the delivery standards of Pinduoduo account for 80% of the whole, only this part of the small white apricots, Abuliz Turdi can earn more than 53,000 yuan, due to his high quality standards of small white apricots, Pinduoduo tens of billions of subsidies can make him earn thousands of yuan more, only fresh small white apricots conservatively estimated income of more than 60,000 yuan. The remaining 20% can also be dried into dried apricots and then sold on Pinduoduo.
▲ Abuliz Turdi, a fruit farmer in Ucha Town, and his daughter-in-law Amanguli Maimai went to the ground early to pick the small white apricots that will be sent away today. Zhou Lane | photo
"It can make at least 20,000 yuan more than selling to the agency in the past." Abulizi Tur said, "We started pre-sales in Pinduoduo a month in advance. Once the apricots are ripe, they are shipped immediately, and they no longer need to look at the buyer's face. ”
Not only that, under the "thumbs up" of Meat Zi Shawuti, Li Chengjun has also become a private "lecturer" of e-commerce knowledge. Many Kucha fruit farmers, including Abulizi Turdi, began to use a mobile phone to start a business of "directly connecting consumers across the country".
Xinjiang fresh products counterattack
Xinjiang is the "hometown of melons and fruits" known throughout the country, and cantaloupe, rock cane apples and other famous, but consumers in the eastern region are difficult to buy genuine products, even if they can buy, the price is generally high. Taking the new fruit star Xiaobai Apricot as an example, the price of fruit shops on the street in Shanghai is mostly 80 to 100 yuan per kilogram.
In order to open up the market blockage between Xinjiang's high-quality fresh agricultural products and the national market, in June 2020, Pinduoduo included Xiaobai apricots in the scope of "10 billion subsidies" and introduced Xiaobai apricots to 800 million consumers through traffic tilting. This approach has yielded miraculous results by lowering the threshold for consumer decision-making through direct subsidies.
The data shows that the sales volume of Xiaobai apricot on the Pinduoduo platform increased by more than 2,000% in the season. This year, Pinduoduo not only continued to subsidize Xiaobaixing for tens of billions of yuan, but also jointly held a live broadcast of "Hi Spelling" with CCTV Finance, and the famous CCTV hosts Lu Jian, Zhu Xun and Long Yang became "recommendation officials" to further expand their popularity.
At the edge of the small white apricot orchard in Ucha Town, the fruit farmers are packaging the small white apricots. In the afternoon, a box of small white apricots will be sent to consumers by courier. Zhou Lane | photo
The "bursting red" of small white apricots is the beginning of Pinduoduo's inclusion of Xinjiang fresh products in tens of billions of subsidies.
Between 2019 and 2020, the online sales of a large number of Xinjiang specialty fruits on the Pinduoduo platform achieved a historical breakthrough. With the continuous increase of state investment in Xinjiang's basic transportation facilities in recent years, xinjiang fresh fruits that were difficult to go out in the past, such as jiashi melon, sand tomatoes, fresh figs, etc., can now be basically delivered to the whole country in 48 hours through the new e-commerce platform.
The extremely high repurchase rate is a major feature of Xinjiang's characteristic fruit products. On the Pinduoduo platform, the proportion of the same consumer purchasing fresh fruit goods shipped from Xinjiang more than three times is as high as 55%. "This is extremely crucial for the formation of the reputation of xinjiang fruits such as small white apricots." Chen Bing, an e-commerce expert in Xinjiang and a professor at the School of Economics and Management of Xinjiang University, said that in recent years, with the help of a large number of Xinjiang fruits out of the Tarim Basin with the help of network platforms, they have been sold to the whole country or even abroad. The new e-commerce platform represented by Pinduoduo focuses on the immediate consumption of fresh products and connects stable orders for the upstream production areas, which is of great significance to driving the upward trend of fresh products in rural areas, and also promotes the optimization and upgrading of the retail category structure of the agricultural product network.
According to the "Xinjiang E-commerce Development Research Report (2020)", in 2020, the online retail sales of agricultural products in Xinjiang reached 12.15 billion yuan. Among them, the online retail sales of fruits reached 7.831 billion yuan, accounting for 64.45% of the online retail sales of agricultural products, ranking first in agricultural products. It is reported that on the 2020 Pinduoduo platform, the order volume of agricultural and sideline products shipped from Xinjiang increased by more than 160% compared with 2019, and more and more Xinjiang characteristic forest fruit products were directly connected to consumers across the country through online channels.
"Xinjiang's agricultural products are ushering in a new era," professor Chen Bing said.
(Correspondent: Zhao Zhikang)