Luwang, January 17 (Reporter Liu Liangliang Photographer Liu Xiaowei) Entrepreneurs in emerging industries are valuable assets for Laoshan District to achieve high-quality development, and their innovative and entrepreneurial spirit is the internal driving force to promote the transformation and reconstruction of the industry. In 2022, Laoshan District will take the opportunity of building a high-level "four new" economic agglomeration area, launch 7 industrial chains around the four leading industries, and emerge a group of outstanding entrepreneurs in emerging industries. In order to promote the spirit of entrepreneurship and create a good atmosphere for the development of the real economy, the Laoshan District Federation of Industry and Commerce (General Chamber of Commerce), together with the Propaganda Department of the Laoshan District Committee of the Communist Party of China and the United Front Work Department of the District Committee, jointly planned and launched the 2023 Emerging Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship Series Interview Column "Promoting the Entrepreneurial Spirit and Witnessing the New Forces of Laoshan Entrepreneurship", focusing on the interactive relationship between entrepreneurship and high-quality industrial development, further promoting the spirit of "doers", and boosting the high-quality development of the real economy in Laoshan District.
After the final drying, automatic packaging, nitrogen filling and nutrient composition testing processes, batches of dog food and cat food were rolled off the production line from the production workshop of Binli pet food at a rate of 3 tons per hour and flowed to the market. With the commissioning of the second production line in March 2024, this figure will reach 8 tons per hour, and the daily production of pet food can meet the daily consumption of nearly 800 20KG huskies.
This "pet food factory" is located in Wanggezhuang Street, Laoshan District, and is a mid-to-high-end pet food brand with a whole industry chain built by Gao Yubin for ten years. The ten-year entrepreneurial journey is just a pet life cycle, and it has also witnessed the transformation of the mainland pet food industry from the dividend period to the core competitiveness. According to iiMedia Consulting data, in 2022, the scale of China's pet economy industry will reach 493.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.2%, and the market size is expected to reach 811.4 billion yuan in 2025.
On such a 100 billion tuyere track, Gao Yubin will Binli pet food from a small workshop, to an annual output value of more than 70 million, the products sell well at home and abroad star pet food brand, what entrepreneurial stories have he experienced in the past ten years? Let's listen to it together.
1
From a passion to a cross-border entrepreneurship
"Stunned green" became more and more frustrated
Gao Yubin is a native of Laoshan Wanggezhuang, who originally ran a carton factory, and he had a stable economy and a harmonious family, so he didn't have to worry about his livelihood. In their spare time, he and his wife fell in love with keeping pets, "because they wanted to solve the food problem of self-owned pets, they began to understand the industry and found that this market still has great potential." Gao Yubin talked about the original intention of entrepreneurship, said that in 2014, with the strong support of his wife, he established Qingdao Binli Pet Products Co., Ltd., began to enter the pet food industry, and chose the subdivision of pet food for "breakthrough".
The road to entrepreneurship at first was not smooth. The production line is not perfect, the product quality is not up to standard, the market positioning is not accurate, and the business model is not mature...... A series of problems poured in, and in just 3 years, nearly 7 million of Gao Yubin's entrepreneurial funds were "burned". "At that time, I felt underestimated all of a sudden, and I even thought about giving up. But with the encouragement of his family, Gao Yubin survived the "death zone" in the early days of entrepreneurship.
Gao Yubin, who cheered up, visited and studied everywhere, strengthened cooperative relations with universities, enterprises, scientific research units and other institutions, strengthened the R&D team, standardized internal management, and clarified the business model based on pet food processing. In 2017, Binli's first fully automatic production line was put into use, which became the first milestone in the development of Binli's pet food.
2
The combination of production, education and research has created a popular product
The company has entered the fast lane of standardized management
In 2017, the scale of the pet food industry exceeded 10 billion yuan for the first time, a year-on-year increase of more than 33%. In the context of the release of huge industry dividends, Binli Pet also ushered in the first "explosive product". "We and Qingdao Agricultural University jointly developed a functional food to prevent pets from loose stool, and the initial market was predicted to be about 10 tons per month, but after consumer trials, the market response was unexpectedly good, and the sales volume suddenly pulled to nearly 100 tons per month, an increase of ten times. The "explosive product" in Gao Yubin's mouth still contributes more than 50% of the output value to the company, and has continuously appeared on the hot list in the field of pet food on the e-commerce platform, becoming a phenomenal product.
Behind the "explosive products" is the emergence of many products after countless quality tests and practices. In order to improve the stability of product quality, Gao Yubin led the team to complete the certification of ISO9001 quality management system and ISO22000 food safety management system, and successfully passed the BRC food safety global standard certification and other international standards, serving more than 100 brands at home and abroad, laying the foundation for Binli pet food to enter the international market.
At this stage, Gao Yubin deeply realized the importance of R&D, he increased R&D funds every year, recruited R&D talents, and worked with universities to build "Binli Pet Food R&D Laboratory", constantly upgrading and updating products, so that Binli pet food can maintain long-term vitality. At the same time, under the guidance of relevant government departments, Gao Yubin's enterprise management has become more and more standardized, and a production management system based on HACCP, GMP, SSOP has been established, and a modern management model has been realized in terms of safety production, management system, and enterprise operation.
3
Adhere to the fertile soil of Laoshan entrepreneurship
Committed to building the whole industry chain of pet economy
Pet food can be divided into full nutrition pet food and other pet food according to its nutritional content and use. Total nutrition pet food is the only source of nutrition other than water during a feeding period to meet the energy, nutritional and physiological needs of pets. Other uses of pet food mainly include all kinds of pet snacks, pet health products and prescription food. In addition to producing fully nutritious pet food, Binli Pet also focuses on pet health products and functional foods.
"We have cooperated with the StuKahn Animal Medical Laboratory to launch a series of functional products to alleviate the problems of intestinal, urinary, joint, hair and hypoallergenic in dogs and cats through related experiments in dog and cat genomics, metabolomics and animal nutrition, and the market has responded well. When talking about the prospects of the enterprise, Gao Yubin said frankly that after 10 years of rapid development, the pet food industry has entered the stage of core competitiveness, scientific and technological innovation has increasingly become the core driving force for the high-quality development of the pet industry, and a new pattern of pet industry development is gradually taking shape.
At present, Binli pet food has been certified as a high-tech enterprise, specialized and special new enterprises, with independent and perfect export qualifications, and the annual output value of the second production line is expected to exceed 100 million yuan after it is put into use. As an emerging star enterprise in the pet food industry, Qingdao Binli is also favored by many domestic cities that want to build industrial clusters. "The investment promotion departments in some regions have also thrown olive branches to me, but after careful consideration, my team and I are still optimistic about Laoshan and Qingdao. Gao Yubin believes that Qingdao has an industrial foundation for the development of pet food, whether it is a raw material base or an industrial base, it has certain advantages and competitiveness. If the first 20 years of the pet economy is a pure market economy, the next 20 years will depend on all sectors of society, including the government, to plan and guide the industry to help the pet industry be healthy, standardized and sustainable.
"At present, Binli's production capacity and market size account for a small proportion of the entire industry, and our own brands are not strong enough, and we still have a lot of room for development. At the same time, I also hope that we, the local enterprises, can focus on the frontier issues of scientific and technological innovation and industrial development, jointly promote the development of Qingdao's pet industry chain, and build the pet industry into a new growth point for high-quality economic development. Gao Yubin said.