Domestic tea e-commerce sales will break through 10 billion yuan

“As an emerging tea sales platform and channel model, e-commerce achieved total tea sales of nearly 8.5 billion yuan last year, and based on the current growth momentum, it is expected to reach 10 billion yuan by the end of 2014.”

Mei Yi, director of the Informationization Services for Agriculture, Rural Areas and Farmers Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, disclosed the above information at the global e-commerce launch ceremony of Hunan Runhe Tea Industry Group held this morning.

He believes that in recent years, the development of China's e-commerce has driven a blowout phenomenon in the tea market. China's tea industry has developed rapidly. In 2013, the national total tea output reached 1.89 million tons, a year-on-year increase of 6.5%, and the national total agricultural output value of tea exceeded 100 billion yuan for the first time.

Provincial and local governments have successively seen the driving significance of the e-commerce industry for the entire regional industry and have rushed to get online.

On July 10, 2013, the Hunan Provincial People's Government issued the "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting the Quality Upgrade of the Tea Industry" as “Xiang Zheng Fa [2013] No. 26 Document”, which clearly pointed out the need to vigorously develop new circulation formats such as e-commerce, direct sales, and mail order, and to establish a tea extract engineering technology research and development platform. Document No. 26 pointed out the shortcomings of Hunan's tea industry and pointed out the development direction for the majority of tea enterprises. A group of outstanding tea enterprises seized the opportunity and began to vigorously develop e-commerce.

Authoritative data show that last year, the transaction volume of agricultural products completed on the Alibaba platform, including B2B business, was 19.86 billion yuan, with tea ranking third, reaching 341.6 million yuan. From the online shopping data for consumers, tea is the agricultural product with the largest sales volume on Taobao, with daily sales reaching 7.22 million yuan. During last year's “Double Eleven” shopping carnival, the total daily transaction volume of the top ten tea e-commerce companies in the Tmall tea category exceeded 40 million. The top ten in Tmall's Double “Eleven” tea category sales were, in order, Longrun, Dayi, Yifutang, Zhongmin Hongtai, Bama, Caicheng, Hongyuanxin, Xinyihao, Tenfu's Tea, and Zhongcha. Among them, Longrun, which ranked first, had sales of about 11.01 million on the day of “Double Eleven”, and Dayi, which ranked second, had total sales of about 8.09 million that day. Yifutang's total transaction volume across all products exceeded 10 million yuan, and the number of packages exceeded 110,000. Last year, tea e-commerce enterprises in Anxi County may have had sales of more than 200 million yuan on the day of “Double Eleven”.

“In 2013, the total transaction volume of Alipay during ‘Double Eleven’ finally settled at 35 billion yuan. The unexpected transaction volume seems to herald the coming of the e-commerce era. Under the halo of many tea enterprises creating online sales miracles last year, many tea enterprises are actively preparing for ‘Double Eleven’ this year to seize the initiative, and are more eye-catching than last year in terms of discounts and marketing innovation.” he said.

Mei Yi then turned to Anhua dark tea, “From the information I have obtained, by this year 80% of Anhua dark tea enterprises have gone online, and most enterprises are trying to drive brand awareness through e-commerce. Among them, dozens of companies promote products through Hunan Dark Tea Network, and as many as 5 large enterprises have cooperated with Hunan Dark Tea. The development prospects for dark tea e-commerce are very optimistic.” he said.

The e-commerce industry generally believes that with the rapid development of the e-commerce market and the emergence of specialized e-commerce service enterprises within the industry, China's tea industry today has ushered in the best development opportunity in its e-commerce transformation, especially reaching its peak state in 2014.

He believes that unlike traditional industries such as baijiu, rice, and oil, tea, as a daily consumer product, does not have obvious natural attributes of being perishable or prone to spoilage, has relatively low requirements for transportation and storage conditions, and people who drink tea have a certain repeat purchase rate. From this perspective, the tea industry seems more suitable for the survival model of e-commerce.