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Mountain village nutty about e-commerce
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EDITOR’S Note
The incredible rise of e-commerce in China has taken many by surprise. The heart of China’s e-commerce industry is centered in Zhejiang Province with Alibaba leading the way in the provincial capital Hangzhou. Today is the 4th in a series of our reporting about the villages that have been transformed after they embraced e-commerce.
Because of its high and deep mountains, Lin’an has featured abundant savory hickory nuts — small, round nuts with crunchy, tasty and fragrant meat — that have been popular in eastern China for centuries.
Now, thanks to the Internet, the people of this Hangzhou region are introducing their flavorful little feasts to the rest of China.
New Year is always a peak season for nuts, as Chinese people love to send them as gifts and eat them when watching TV. Shanghai Daily visited Bainiu Village of Lin’an, one of the top villages selling farm products online in China, to see how farmers in the mountains learned that they could turn nuts into gold.
In Fang Qiang’s office a computer beeps incessantly, and Fang’s hands fly over the keyboard nonstop to process orders from Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Beijing and other parts of China. The man in his late 30s has sold 20 million yuan (US$3.22 million) worth of nuts of all kinds via the Internet during the past year.
“During the first three months since we officially started e-business, we sold 2 million yuan of nuts,” said Fang, adding that he was shocked by the power of the Internet.
Like many of his neighbors, Fang is a local of Bainiu Village who was born into a family whose business was processing nuts — turning them from raw to cooked and flavored.
After his military service, Fang returned home in 2010 and began selling hickories. He now runs his Linzhiyuan Nuts Store on four websites: taobao.com, tmall.com, JD.com and 1hd.com.
He is a representative e-commerce businessman in Bainiu Village but hardly the only one and not the first. In 2014, Bainiu Village, with only about 550 households, enjoyed some 200 million yuan of nut sales. About 60 percent were hickories.
The village has three large plants that process nuts and sell them online, as well as about 50 medium- and small-size C2C online stores that wholesale processed nuts and then retail them online.
“A couple with their parents and maybe also cousins, uncles and aunties together to run an online store — this is a very ordinary business mode of our village,” said Zhang Qing, secretary general of the Bainiu Village E-Commerce Association.
Indeed, the small village of Bainiu does not even produce hickories. Locals purchase the nuts from nearby towns in Lin’an, then process them into cooked and packaged foods before selling them.
Some farmers there smelled a business opportunity on the Internet earlier than others, of course. Xu Xing is one of the early birds. Before 2008, “I was only an agent making not much money by purchasing and then reselling hickories,” he said.
Now, even though he is still purchasing and reselling hickories, he is such a successful entrepreneur that his store in peak season needs to hire more than 20 people to package and send products. In the past few years, Xu has changed his car from a van to a Honda and now to a BMW.
He has become a positive example to other villagers.
Xu notes that just three or four years ago a senior couple in the village did not support their children doing online business at all, asking “how can you sell nuts by only staying at home?” Now they encourage their children to come back home for e-commerce because “you can make money by just staying at home now!”
So the thriving business has not only made locals wealthier, but has helped Bainiu escape the fate of so many other villages that are losing their young people. Here, the young can stay in the countryside because of the job opportunities.
Outside of Bainiu, there are scores of villages in Lin’an selling farm produce as well. To avoid competition with Bainiu, they sell agricultural products such as bamboo shoots, tea and eggs, which are also Lin’an specialties.
The Lin’an government encourages e-commerce with preferential policies. Young villagers coming back home to start e-commerce stores can receive an allowance of 50,000 yuan, and enterprises that sell 3 million yuan worth of goods online for two consecutive years can receive an allowance of 100,000 yuan.
But the commerce is not without problems. In Bainiu Village, increasing competition has made selling hickories more difficult, especially for small new stores. In addition, production is limited because the small village has few warehouses; most owners of small stores simply save nuts in their homes.
That is why Bainiu villagers spontaneously found the Bainiu Village E-Commerce Association last October.
“To develop on one’s own is not the future, but to develop as a whole is the way out,” said Zhang Qing the secretary.
Zhang said the association will train new online store owners, help small-scale stores wholesale together for a better price, and plans to build more warehouses in and near the village.
To be more professional, the association also outsources marketing and promotion functions to a company to help operate villagers’ businesses. The company is responsible for taking photos, writing proposals and doing promotion.
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