Author / Yao Yun
Source / Bentan Finance (ID:daxiongfan)
After arriving after a bumpy ride, An Yulong and they were already waiting for us by the river.
"Where's the toilet?" After getting out of the car, I inquired urgently, and looked around, except for the cattle and sheep grazing leisurely, and the bee shed a hundred meters away, I couldn't find any place like a toilet.
"There are toilets everywhere, just find a hidden place." Li Ping, the founder of Sanjiang Shepherd who led us into the mountains, said.
After seeing our surprise, he repeated it again with a slight joke: "Haha, there are toilets everywhere." ”
The destination of the trip was located among the mountains under the jurisdiction of Yininghuo County in Xinjiang, which belongs to the branch of the Tianshan Mountains. The exact name cannot be found on the map, the nearest is a scenic spot called Guozigou, and half an hour before reaching the destination, the mobile phone was in a state of no signal.
The pastures here have no names, are divided and marked by numerical numbers, and An Yulong's pasture is on the other side of the river. An Yulong's pasture is numbered 8016, the area is 1100 acres, and there are currently 480 sheep. Before that, An Yulong and the surrounding herders grazed on a similar scale, basically between 120 and 150.
The sheep in An Yulong's ranch
In March 2018, An Yulong signed an underwriting and support agreement with Sanjiang Shepherd. After the cooperation was reached, the scale and income of An Yulong Ranch have increased steadily. Before the cooperation, the average annual income was about 60,000 yuan, and a family of 5 basically made ends meet. Now, after expanding the scale, the annual income has reached more than 210,000.
The reason for the previous restraint was not the limited manpower and the limited area of the pasture. Internal demand is limited and stable, it is very easy for prices to fluctuate, and it is difficult for fresh food to get out of Xinjiang.
"To get rich before building roads", road construction once became the key to rural prosperity, from a commercial point of view, this solves the logistics problem. Then there is the equality of information and the support of traffic - from Ding Zhen, He Jiaolong and other out of the circle, to the recent explosion of Caoxian 666, traffic has ignited the economy. Under the technological innovation, in addition to logistics and traffic, the way to revitalize the countryside is quietly changing.
"The volume of lamb out of Xinjiang is currently small, but it is growing rapidly, growing naturally at a rate of 60%-80% per year." Li Ping told us.
Under Li Ping's Three Frontier Shepherds, there are 25 others who have signed cooperation contracts with pastures of an size like An Yulong. Li Ping told Box Lunch Finance (ID: daxiongfan) that at present, 12,530 sheep from Sanjiang Sheep are sold in Xinjiang in 2020, and the total number of sheep in Xinjiang from 2018 to the present is about 70,000.
Behind the common growth of Li Ping and An Yulong, it is because the key button has been found: "At present, the sales of Sanjiang Shepherd are all online, of which the growth rate is the fastest in JD.com, with an annual growth rate of about 120%-150% from 2018 to 2020." ”
The e-commerce platform is not only the wings of cattle and sheep rushing out of tianshan, such products are not only cattle and sheep, but also specialties such as fruit dan skin, lavender, dried fruit are accelerating out of Tianshan. At the time of the biggest activity of China's e-commerce company in 618, Box Lunch Finance (ID: daxiongfan) visited a number of enterprises distributed in Yining, Xinjiang, to try to find a new way for Xinjiang products to go global.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="34" >01 go out</h1>
Everything is to bring Xinjiang's good products out of Xinjiang.
From Beijing to Yining, the fastest flight is CA1233, which stops in Karamay, a journey of more than six hours and 2924 kilometers, passing through the Taihang Mountains, the Loess Plateau, the Qilian Mountains, the Inner Mongolia Plateau, across the Alxa League contracted by the Dasuo tree, crossing the Jungar Basin, the second largest inland basin in China, and flying to Yining in the Ili River Basin after a short break in the oil city of Karamay. It is only a 40-minute drive from Khorgos, which borders the border.
And this is not the destination, from the city center of Yining, it will take another hour to drive to An Yulong's pasture on the Tianshan Mountains.
Tianshan mountain is not a mountain, but a mountain system spanning four countries, surrounded by rolling mountains, such as fresh products such as cattle and sheep, and not being able to go out is the biggest pain point.
"There are more than 100,000 people living in this mountain." Li Ping told us that herders live in the mountains and their livelihood is mainly sheep herding. According to the data, in the first half of 2020, there were 46.27 million sheep in Xinjiang, accounting for about 80% of the Tianshan Mountains, about 37.01 million.
In Xinjiang, some Kazakh herders still maintain the traditional habit of nomadic people living by water and grass. Every year, herders have to drive their livestock from winter pasture to summer pasture, or from summer pasture to winter pasture, a process called "transfer".
Although it can be transported by car, the herders near Yining still retain the most traditional "transfer" process.
Every spring, An Yulong rode a horse and a dog to drive the sheep from the bottom of the mountain to the pastoral area on the mountain. The whole process lasted for several days, resting in place after dark, and after repairing, it continued to move forward until it reached the pastoral area on the mountain.
If you look at the grasslands along the road, you'll occasionally see the scattered huts, which are the settlements of Kazakh nomads when they change their grazing fields. In this pastoral area covering an area of more than 1,000 acres, The main living area of An Yulong is also in such a tent.
Cottage of less than 10 m2, at the foot of the mountain, 15 minutes walk from the river and 3 minutes for horse riding. The wooden planks of the house were neatly covered with thick futons, which became a bed; on the bed was a small wooden table, and if there were no visitors, this was where An Yulong ate—these two occupied the vast majority of the hut.
Directly opposite the door, there are two large iron pots in the open air, which is the "kitchen" of An Yulong, and the firewood for burning the fire and washing are water hoarded in advance with large plastic buckets.
Perennial grazing life and high ultraviolet rays in pastoral areas, 36-year-old An Yulong looks older than his actual age.
An Yulong is a villager in Bexi Agashi Village, Lucaogou Town, Huocheng County, who drives cattle and sheep from the winter pasture to the summer pasture every spring, and when it is around November, it will be transferred from the summer pasture to the winter pasture and down the mountain to return to the village. When the pasture is grazing in the summer, they come home irregularly every week to pick up some daily necessities needed for grazing in the mountains.
Due to the complex wilderness of mountain roads, horses are the best means of transportation.
A hut, two boilers, two dogs, two horses, and a helper are most of An Yulong's companions during herding in the summer. No feed, no captivity, all the meadows in the mountains, the grass on the edge of the cliffs, the streams formed by the melting snow of the snowy mountains, as long as the cattle and sheep want to go, these can be easily obtained.
"Sheep in other places are mostly kept in captivity, but sheep in Xinjiang are grazed on grassland. Free-range sheep not only have no smell, but even have a milky smell. Li Ping said.
An Yulong's ranch
The business logic here seems to be different from the conventional wisdom - the natural advantage makes it very easy to produce high-quality products here.
Chen Canping, the internet celebrity "county magistrate", is also the dean of the School of Economics of Southwest University for Nationalities and the former deputy county magistrate of Anhua County in Yiyang City, Hunan Province, and has been active in the frontline of revitalizing the rural economy. Recently, when he participated in a public event, he said: "The biggest problem with agricultural products is not the problem of supply, but the problem of demand. ”
Let consumers know that completing the symmetry of information is the first step.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="253" >02 How to sell is a problem</h1>
"You directly search for Xinjiang lamb in Jingdong, and we are the first in the ranking." The search keywords that Li Ping tells us are not regular brands or business names.
"Don't search for sheep in the three frontiers?"
"Well, you can also search, but you can search for Xinjiang lamb and you can come straight out."
In 2013, Li Ping, who was still a programmer, decided to quit his job in Shenzhen and return to his hometown to start a business. At that time, he already had a monthly salary of more than 15,000 yuan, and he was in charge of more than a dozen people. This was definitely not a good decision in the eyes of most people at the time.
Just when Li Ping decided to resign and return to his hometown to do agriculture, China's Internet also ushered in a flashpoint of development: the official issuance of 4G licenses, a new round of information consumption is brewing; the concept of big data is gradually clear, the industry is eager to try; Chu orange willow peach pan apple, lychee cherry cherry cherry, test cold chain logistics and warehousing solutions of agricultural products fresh war is about to start.
"Originally, we mainly sold under the Urumqi line, and we sold about one or two thousand heads a year. Now through JD.com online sales, customers all over the country can buy. After five years of offline store operation, Li Ping began to transfer his business to online.
It is understood that at present, Jingdong accounts for more than 95% of the online channels of Sanjiang Sheep, and as of now, 13,650 Xinjiang big-tailed sheep have been sold through the Jingdong platform. In terms of quantity and increment, it has firmly ranked first in the sales volume of Jingdong Xinjiang lamb category.
"This year, 618 wants to rush and reach 600,000 sales on the same day." This figure was 60,000 in the first year of settlement and 160,000 in the second year.
The change of the front end can make consumers quickly perceive, and the sales channel is only a link in the industrial chain, and the cooperation of inventory, logistics and other links can smoothly and completely support the entire chain. In a sense, consumers place orders, just the beginning. How to let consumers quickly receive goods after placing an order, how to control warehouse inventory, how to cooperate with logistics and distribution, and how to control data by farmers? Addressing these issues is equally important.
In order to achieve the goal of 618 sales of 600,000 on the day, Li Ping made several preparations: logistics, the goods into the Xi'an warehouse of Jingdong, reducing logistics costs and improving transportation efficiency, the fastest can be reached in one day; in terms of stockpiling, the time required for lamb from slaughter to delivery is short, and Li Ping requires that there be an uninterrupted supply of 500-600 sheep in the warehouse.
"After starting a business, I learned that the biggest problem in corporate growth is not in the product at all, but in the channel, that is, how to sell it." Compared with the offline stores in the previous five years and today's "small goals", Li Ping said with emotion.
Having experienced the actual battle of entrepreneurship, and Li Ping invariably expressed the same emotion, there is also Nihemati, the founder of Ili Shimengyuan Guodanpi.
He once worked as a civil servant in the Ili Prefecture Animal Husbandry Bureau, and went to Guangzhou to do foreign trade, when he found that the snack Guodan Peel in his childhood, because of the problems of standardization, productization and scale, gradually disappeared from the public vision, so he returned to his hometown to do Guodan Peel.
The local guodan peel in Ili is different from other places in that the basic raw material is not traditional hawthorn, but apples or apricots.
Nihemat, photographed by Wang Xiaojun
"My brain is hot, I want to start a business!" But after going out, I found that many of my ideas were wrong. Nihemat reflected while recalling, "Take the product, I now think that making a product is very simple, you will not do it yourself, someone will do it for you, but the sales link is too difficult, and many people I have met are planted in this aspect." ”
Nihemati's road to starting a business in Guodanpi began with his own yard: "We were building cars behind closed doors, making Godanpi directly in the yard, and when I took Guodanpi outside, I was confused, who to give or who to eat, this was not well considered." ”
In 2014, Nihemati, who made Guodan pi, took the products to the market and gave them to wholesalers one by one to try: "At that time, many wholesalers did not know how to sell this thing, he did not dare to try, I let them try it for free." ”
With this way of selling, a little bit of accumulation has accumulated the market.
In the traditional industrial chain, agricultural products go from the field to the hands of consumers, and they have to go through the links of "farmers - origin buyers - wholesale markets of origins - vendors of sales - wholesale markets of sales - supermarkets - consumers".
Herders like An Yulong belong to the first link, and Nihemat and Li Ping once played the role of origin buyers.
In 2019, Nihemat took his Shimengyuan Guodanpi to the Jingdong China Specialty Yiliguan store.
It is understood that as of March this year, Jingdong Fresh has more than 1,000 online specialty pavilions authorized by governments at all levels in various places, involving a total of more than 600,000 agricultural products. Up to now, the Jingdong platform has achieved a transaction volume of more than 580 billion yuan in agricultural products, and the fresh cold chain covers nearly 300 large and medium-sized cities.
"Originally March and April were the off-season, but in March this year, about 140,000 in ten days, we directly pushed us to the eighth place in the national fruit dan peel sales, and now some are in short supply." Nihemat said this, slightly straightening his chest, and the corners of his mouth involuntarily rose.
From the perspective of product and transportation, Nihemati's Guodan skin is more fortunate than Li Ping's beef and mutton.
"If sent from Yining, the express delivery can reach consumers outside Xinjiang in as soon as 5 days." If you place an order directly at the Jingdong Specialty Museum, the Yuncang in Urumqi will arrive in about three days, saving a lot of time. Nihemat told us.
Through the warehousing method of advance preparation, Nihemati's Guodan Pi can be replenished by truck to the centralized warehouse point, without the need for LTL logistics with slow timeliness and high logistics costs.
The support of traffic and the smooth flow of logistics have become another way to get rich after building roads.
"Except for tibet, which has not been shipped, now people all over the country have eaten my godan skin." Nowadays, e-commerce has become the main channel for Nihemati to sell Xinjiang Guodanpi to the whole country.
Lengthy intermediate links create additional logistics and warehousing costs, resulting in an imbalance between demand and supply at the production and consumer ends.
Uplink path map of e-commerce agricultural products, drafted: Box Lunch Finance
After passing through the e-commerce platform, this process has been streamlined as a whole. At this time, from the supply of agricultural products to the purchase of customers, it is necessary to go through "farmers - various e-commerce platforms - sales - mailing - logistics enterprise distribution - customer purchase".
From agricultural goods to agricultural products, farmers need more than just sales channels and traffic.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="254" >03 Traffic, logistics, services, tied stones sink to the bottom of the sea</h1>
At the entrance of the Jingdong Cha County Business Department, there is a special courier car parked.
This express delivery car, unlike other express delivery brand small box battery cars around, is incompatible - a white van with the Jingdong red logo printed on it, which is completely different from the express car seen every day.
Jingdong express car parked at the door
The full name of Cha County is Chabuchar Xibo Autonomous County, Ili Prefecture, which means "granary" in Xibo language, and the county has jurisdiction over 13 townships and a total area of 4132 square kilometers.
In 2014, Lei Xiaolei was called by the "Pioneer Station" plan to return to his hometown and establish the predecessor of the Jingdong Cha County Sales Department here.
This is a very different courier truck, so that it can be delivered to the home. Due to the wide number of people in Xinjiang, Xinjiang's express delivery has two characteristics, one is that there is little package mail to the home, and the other is that there is no difference in the need to pick up.
"Only Jingdong can deliver to home, the conventional express battery car is only enough for the city center, the surrounding townships can not get to it, once in order to send a courier, I drove 40 minutes to there." Lei Xiaolei told us.
And that's just one of the pain points. By the end of 2018, the total population of the county reached 194,000, 63,000 Han and 131,000 ethnic minorities, which were composed of 25 ethnic groups, including Xibe, Uyghur, Kazakh, Han, Hui and Mongolian.
The language barrier is also a difficult point for express delivery to consumers smoothly.
The courier brother who knows many minority languages is delivering goods Xinhua News Agency reporter Hou Zhaokang photographed
It seems that because of the particularity of its region, business is undergoing the most rigorous test.
The land is sparsely populated, from the city center down to the county, half an hour drive to see the fields and villages, very common; rich in products, especially agricultural products represented by melons and fruits, but it is very difficult to transport them out; diverse ethnic minorities gather, textbook demand, business theory, supply relations, large-scale development, it seems that it is impossible to go here.
The business logic of first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen is different from the county economy.
Ma Liang, a researcher at the National Development and Strategic Research Institute of Chinese Min University, told Bento Finance and Economics: The county economy is also facing many problems and challenges at the same time, it is facing small, scattered, and no system, including some counties have leading industries, but these industries are under the impact of new economic formats, and sometimes there is no way to adapt and transform well, facing the dilemma of survival and development.
Under the epidemic, the popularity of online education has made significant changes in the consumption trend of students and families on digital products.
"After the epidemic, there are more computers and printers in our store, because whether it is at school or at home, we have to type some papers, review materials and the like."
Daniel Zhang is the owner of the Jingdong computer digital store, starting from mobile phone repair, and also opened a repair point, and later upgraded to the brand mobile phone flagship store. In 2019, he started a business for the second time and decided to transform the small shop into a Jingdong computer digital store.
Through review and screening, the authorization given by JD.com to Daniel Zhang is unique in Yining area, and the service scope radiates eight counties and two cities in Ili Prefecture, and the business radiation area is larger than that of 15 Beijings.
"There was once a Kazakh guy whose home was more than seventy kilometers away from the store, he bought a headset, I drove to deliver it, and the 140 kilometers of fuel costs back and forth exceeded the cost of headphones. But, because of the good service, he introduced his friends and classmates over and got two computers off my side. Daniel Zhang recalled.
Different regions and cultures, consumer needs will also undergo diversified changes.
In addition to such an over-the-money running service, helping customers place orders is the most common thing Daniel Zhang do: "People who don't know here may wonder, why do you want to help others place orders?" There are many ethnic minority compatriots in Yining, many of whom do not speak Mandarin very well, and some of them do not even understand it, let alone use smart phones to place orders. ”
Instant noodles, paper, computers, mice, take the opportunity of offline experience, in addition to answering product questions, at the request of consumers to help place orders.
Daniel Zhang help to place orders, as we ordinary consumers place orders on Jingdong, from the data point of view, and his sales are not directly related: "If you do not do a good job of service regardless of cost, the adhesion behind will be very high, this user will recognize you very much, Yining area many problems that cannot be solved online, we can solve them at any time offline." ”
It is understood that in 2018, Jingdong Computer Digital launched an offline strategy, building 50 stores in the same year, and the number of stores exceeded 200 in 2019, mainly in the computer city and university markets. As of March 2021, JD Computer Digital Stores has 847 offline stores nationwide, covering 645 districts and counties.
In the more than an hour of chatting with Daniel Zhang, service, experience, and fast are the high-frequency keywords that he always keeps talking about.
Daniel Zhang, photographed by Wang Xiaojun
Lei Xiaolei's Jingdong Cha County Sales Department, Daniel Zhang Jingdong Computer Digital Specialty Store, is the gripper that sinks service and quality to the terminal.
From the road to the information, to the traffic, logistics, the long-term problem is still their own hematopoiesis. Throughout the ages, transportation has not only solved the problem of profits, losses, and trade volumes, but also narrowed the distance between people, influenced the concept of time, repainted the map, and opened the conceptual innovation called commoditization and globalization in recent days.
Daniel Zhang told us: "Last year, on the day of 618, the sales in the store reached more than 500,000, and he expects to exceed the million level this year." ”
The pursuit of commercial efficiency is thriving in this land.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="255" >04 A new competition for business efficiency</h1>
Going out, staying, and coming in are the three key points.
In the "Research Report on Short Videos and Live Broadcasts Helping new county economic development" released by the National Development and Strategic Research Group of Renmin University, it is written:
"The long-standing dual structure of urban and rural areas artificially separates the production-consumption relationship between cities and villages, and makes it difficult to form an effective production and marketing integration system between urban and rural areas."
On the one hand, due to the insufficient large-scale and intensive production organization and the imperfect logistics network, the high-quality agricultural products produced in rural areas are also facing the problem of entering the city. How to recommend the coordinated development of urban and rural industries and accelerate the two-way circulation of urban and rural goods and services has become a key issue in the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy.
On the other hand, the low income of rural residents, the increase in the price of commodities and the limited sales channels make it difficult for high-quality products from cities to go to the countryside smoothly. ”
Li Ping's Three Xinjiang Shepherds, with the help of the Jingdong platform, steadily scaled and productized the scattered products of the herders, and solved the part of going out. Daniel Zhang Jingdong computer digital store, Lei Xiaolei's Jingdong Cha County Sales Department, one to bring good products and good services, affordable to bring in, one to deliver products quickly and effectively, these two solve the problem of walking in.
Through their own blood production, they will form a high-quality environment that can retain talents.
In the stories of Li Ping, Lei Xiaolei and others, we see the plot of the talents who went out and returned to the township. And they will lead to the growth of a group of people.
"In 2019, I calculated that if I harvested about 1,200 tons of fruit, I would be able to directly drive seventeen or eight big fruit growers. The big fruit farmers also have to hire local workers, and there are about 200 households around the big fruit farmers, basically more than 1,000 people. Yili has so many fruits, enterprises like ours, if there are a dozen or twenty, can completely bring up the whole piece of it. "In the structure of the industrial chain, going back up, Nihemati calculated a very considerable employment account for us.
E-commerce and scale are the key to increasing revenue, and they are also the core elements of making bulk agricultural goods commercial products.
Most of the e-commerce or traffic platforms have given farmers a channel for external dissemination and sales, which is the first step we saw in the process of this visit. On the basis of product going global, they are thinking about business efficiency issues such as scale and cost.
In the upward road of agricultural products, in addition to the troubles of supply and demand docking, it cannot be scaled due to dispersion, resulting in few logistics stations for farmers to mail agricultural products, long mailing distances, and high costs. After the successful sale of agricultural products through the e-commerce platform, farmers often need to run to the township logistics service point for mailing, not only the distance is long and the sending is expensive, the time cost and economic cost are much higher than the urban delivery.
Shortening and optimizing a supply chain may be able to industrialize the scale development of agricultural products in a region, bringing direct income increase to locals; and opening up the business model of a place and combining it with local conditions through digital capabilities, after replicating it to various places, it will solve more than just the problem of one family, one village and one place.
He Jiaolong, who has recently taken up his post, has become a local figure in Yining.
Recently, in response to a reporter's question, she said that the traffic from live broadcasting and the Internet has been precipitated: "The traffic we have precipitated has benefited tourism enterprises. Our agricultural enterprises, from the initial brink of bankruptcy to the current shortage of supply, this is our flow resources, has benefited our agricultural enterprises, benefits to our people. ”
"Because each agricultural product represents the people from the land to the table, and every link of each industrial chain has the people to increase income and solve the problem of employment, I think this is the benefit that our agricultural enterprises, including the people, get." The people's sense of pride and honor has also increased. He Jiaolong mentioned.
Traffic to solve the information symmetry, so that consumers know this product; logistics to solve not only to go out, but also how to go out in the fastest time, under the premise of ensuring product quality, to solve the core problems, is a long-term service and experience; next, let the standard and digital addition, may be to make agricultural products become closer to the standard key.
"To get rich, build roads first" is only the first step to getting rich in the countryside.