The entrepreneurial story of Wei Jinzhi, the flower king of Hainan
In the summer of 2000, something strange happened in Danzhou City, Hainan Province. At a garbage dump in the suburbs of Danzhou City, a group of people spent several days burning things. Every day the dump was ablaze with flames, attracting some nearby villagers to come and watch. According to villagers who were there at the time, this group of people burned flowers for a whole week, and all of them were blooming flowers. Watching beautiful flowers go up in flames, the villagers all felt it was a great pity, and they also could not understand why these people were doing this.
Wei Jinzhi
The anthurium flower originated in the tropical rainforests of South America and is a precious flower of the world. Because its blooming flower resembles an outstretched palm and its color is bright red and gorgeous, it is called anthurium. On the flower market, the price of each pot of anthurium was about 40 to 50 yuan. Why would such fine flowers be taken away to be burned?
Every day, large numbers of blooming anthuriums were dumped at the garbage dump, piled up like a small mountain, then doused with gasoline and destroyed in raging fire. The actions of these flower burners made the watching villagers think they had all gone insane.
Just who were these people burning the anthuriums? Why were they burning them? Could it be that they were all people who did not love flowers? In fact, it was exactly the opposite. These people burning the flowers were the very people who had grown these anthuriums, employees of Hainan Nanchengmei Horticulture Company. So why would flower growers burn flowers? The story has to start with a Taiwanese businessperson investing on the mainland.
Wei Jinzhi was born in Taiwan's hometown of flowers, Yongjing Township in Changhua County, and from childhood she had always followed her family in growing flowers, gaining rich horticultural experience. In 1990, Wei Jinzhi took a optimistic view of the mainland flower market and decided to come to the mainland to invest in flower cultivation.
In the early 1990s, the varieties sold on the mainland flower market were relatively few, so no matter what kind of flowers Wei Jinzhi introduced from Taiwan, they all sold very well. As soon as the goods arrived, mainland distributors would scramble for them, sometimes even fighting to be able to buy them.
The vigorous development of the mainland flower industry brought Wei Jinzhi huge economic benefits and also allowed her to accumulate a certain amount of wealth. In 1998, Wei Jinzhi discovered that mainland consumers liked anthuriums very much, and the market often sold out, so she decided to cultivate anthuriums herself. This time, she wanted to do a big business deal. She planned to put all her funds into anthurium cultivation.
Wei Jinzhi (Source: CCTV International)
All of Wei Jinzhi's anthurium seedlings were imported from the Netherlands. The purchase price of each small seedling was about 3.5 yuan, and for 500,000 seedlings the purchase cost was close to 2 million yuan. If all these anthuriums were sold, the wholesale price of each pot of anthurium could reach about 30 yuan, and 500,000 pots of anthurium could bring Wei Jinzhi more than 15 million yuan in returns. The huge economic benefits filled her with beautiful hopes for her career on the mainland.
However, the greater the hope, the greater the disappointment. Wei Jinzhi had not expected that after two years of hard waiting, what finally came was not the good news that the anthuriums had sold, but bad news: the anthuriums had gotten sick. When the seedlings were introduced from the Netherlands, they had already been infected with nematodes, and the infection was golden nematodes, one of the most harmful types of nematode. At present there was no good method for dealing with golden nematodes. The only effective method was destruction, but destroying 500,000 pots of anthurium all at once was undoubtedly a painful decision for Wei Jinzhi. The company's funds and energy over the past two years had all been invested in these anthuriums. Now not only had it not earned a single cent, it instead had to destroy them all, a huge loss. At the time, some people suggested selling this batch of anthuriums infected with nematodes at a low price, recovering as much as possible.
The work of destroying the anthuriums lasted a full week. Watching pot after pot of fresh flowers being cleared away, the greenhouse immediately became empty and bare, and Wei Jinzhi's mood was extremely heavy. She had originally counted on these anthuriums to bring her even greater economic benefits, but unexpectedly in the end she not only did not earn a single cent, she also had to personally burn the anthuriums she had grown for two years. Of an investment of several million yuan, in the end all that remained was a pile of grass ash at the garbage dump and empty flower pots in the greenhouse.
After the anthurium failure, Wei Jinzhi did not even have the money to buy new flower seedlings again, and the company's operations were hard to sustain. At this time, Wei Jinzhi's family gave her great support. This allowed her to start over.