Driving agriculture with commerce helps agricultural products enter the big market, achieving new breakthroughs in mutually beneficial development
Every morning, the aquatic products wholesale area of the Tangshan Shenghua Shijia Agricultural Trade and Aquatic Products Comprehensive Wholesale Market is buzzing with noise. Seventy or eighty trucks fully loaded with aquatic products line up to unload, and the crowd coming to trade is bustling, inspecting goods, haggling over prices, packing baskets, carrying, weighing, settling accounts, a busy yet orderly and lively scene.
Market General Manager Zhang Wei told reporters that the average daily trading volume of aquatic products here reaches 2000 tons, and nearly 1000 vehicles transporting aquatic products enter the market every day. It is the largest aquatic products wholesale market in Tangshan City, Hebei Province, and the main distribution center for high-quality aquatic products from the Bohai Bay.
Relative to the entire Tangshan Shenghua Shijia Commercial Plaza, the aquatic products wholesale area covering 120 mu is only a small part of the agricultural trade and aquatic products comprehensive wholesale market. In addition to the agricultural trade and aquatic products comprehensive wholesale market, the commercial plaza also has four major markets: the non-staple food trading market, the fruit wholesale market, the flower market, and the Jidong Antique City, with a total building area of 380,000 sq m and an annual trading volume of nearly 9.67 billion yuan.
Establishing an agricultural trade market network of such a scale took less than four years. How was such speed achieved? “Merchants enter with a low threshold, agricultural and sideline products are purchased and sold in a one-stop manner, and the entire industry chain of production and marketing operations is developed.” Geng Ligong, Chairman of Shenghua Group, the investing enterprise of the commercial plaza, gave reporters the answer.
Taking mutually beneficial development as a breakthrough, building a market trading platform
Today, when agricultural products are generally “difficult to sell,” it is not difficult to think of establishing a market; what is difficult is to run the market well, make it vibrant, and make it big. How did the people of Shenghua do it?
At the beginning of the founding of Shenghua Shijia Commercial Plaza, surveys found that agricultural product wholesale markets in the Jidong region generally suffered from problems such as small sites, inconvenient transportation, and a single variety of traded goods. In addition, the threshold for merchants to enter and operate was high and there were many restrictions, resulting in weak popularity and difficulty for merchants to profit. “Only when the market has popularity can merchants benefit, and only then can the market operate vibrantly.” Geng Ligong said. Based on this, after the commercial plaza was completed, Shenghua Group launched a combined set of measures: on the basis of inviting and attracting merchants nationwide, it broadly absorbed farmers producing fresh agricultural products to enter and operate; at the same time, the market opened 8 scheduled free bus routes directly to the urban area to make it convenient for citizens to shop at the market. This move benefited all three parties: producers, operators, and consumers, while the market itself achieved both economic and social benefits through small profits but quick turnover and large-scale operations. At present, the commercial plaza has more than 2000 operating households in aquatic products, vegetables, meat, grain and oil, fruits, non-staple foods, and flowers, with the total number of merchants ranking first among agricultural and sideline product markets in the Tangshan area.
⟦NL> Guided by one-stop purchasing and sales, promoting market prosperity
In market operations, the people of Shenghua proposed the business philosophy of “one-stop purchasing and sales” and guided merchants to adopt the business model of “both wholesale and retail.” Coming to Shenghua, from rice, flour, and oil to seasonings and spatulas, from various vegetables, meats, and fruits to sugar, tea, and beverages, from various flowers and bonsai to home decorative artworks, everything can be purchased in one stop, greatly stimulating the purchasing enthusiasm of citizens, major consumer households, and distributors. Tens of thousands of tons of agricultural and sideline products, through this kind of “one-stop service,” have achieved smooth circulation of goods and thriving both purchasing and sales.
In order to build a broader intensive market platform and enrich the content of market transactions, the people of Shenghua proactively introduced exhibition culture into market operations.
In January 2014, Shenghua Shijia Commercial Plaza held the “Tangshan Second New Year Goods Fair,” with first-day transactions exceeding 60 million yuan and customer flow reaching as high as 110,000 visits. “Go to Shenghua to buy New Year goods!” became the sentence Tangshan citizens said most often during the Spring Festival. During the just-passed National Day period, the market also hosted the “Sixth Tangshan Agricultural Products Exhibition and Trade Fair and High-Quality Brand Benefit Farmers and Agriculture China Tour——Entering Tangshan” event, gathering 385 domestic enterprises to exhibit and sell, with 156 buyers and nearly 100,000 visits of people coming to the site to purchase.
Now, Shenghua Shijia Commercial Plaza has an average daily customer flow of more than 30,000 visits, with more than 50,000 varieties traded. Sales of agricultural and sideline products have covered the entire surrounding area of Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan, and Qinhuangdao, and are also sold far to Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, the three northeastern provinces, and some provinces and cities in the south, truly becoming a well-known distribution center for agricultural and sideline products.
Using the market as a fulcrum, building a full-industry operation chain
“Competition among agricultural product wholesale markets is no longer point-based competition between markets, but an overall contest between the industrial chains extending around the market itself and its upstream and downstream, as well as the value networks woven from those industrial chains.” Regarding the market's development, Geng Ligong explained to reporters in detail.
Under the guidance of the concept of full-industry-chain development, Shenghua Shijia Commercial Plaza has established good cooperative relations with a group of large grain, aquatic product, livestock, and fruit and vegetable growers in the city, agricultural cooperatives, and agricultural product deep-processing enterprises. Fresh peaches and melons from places such as Laoting, chestnuts and walnuts from places such as Qianxi, and cooked food products from enterprises such as Shierde and Wanlixiang have all established stable sales channels in Shenghua Shijia Commercial Plaza. They are not only loved by Tangshan citizens, but have also become favorites of distributors across the country.
The operation model of “market + base + farmers” is another choice of the people of Shenghua in implementing full-industry-chain development. At present, a high-quality agricultural product production base with an area of 5000 mu is under intensive construction, and multiple other production bases are also in the process of site selection and negotiation. The Shenghua economic ecological chain of “contract farming, standardized production, order-based recovery, and unified market sales” is gradually taking shape.