Vigorous Night China | Exploring the Technological Power Behind a Flower | Yunnan | Technology

During the day, China is full of vitality, but after entering the night, China has a different kind of liveliness and busyness. Today's Vitality Night in China, we enter Yunnan to explore the new development of the flower industry there.

The Yunnan Dounan Flower Trading Market, with a history of over 20 years, is the only national level flower market in China. With the strong promotion of major projects such as national industrial clusters and provincial-level "one county, one industry" demonstration, Yunnan's flower industry has embarked on a new path of high quality and efficiency.

In recent years, the floral industry in Yunnan has accelerated its development. In 2022, the total output value of the flower industry exceeded 110 billion yuan, doubling from four years ago. Since the first half of 2023, the overall demand for fresh flower consumption in Yunnan has steadily increased. From January to April, the province's fresh cut flower production was about 6.5 billion branches, a year-on-year increase of 9%.

Seize the freshness and auction quickly, but the hands are slow and have nothing to offer

The flowers for bulk wholesale trading in Dounan are harvested on the same day, processed in the fields, and then transported to the wholesale market. The trading on the same day must be completed overnight to ensure that the freshest flower products enter the retail market the next day. Approximately 36% of the bulk flowers in Yunnan are sold through auctions. Follow the reporter's camera to Kunming International Flower Auction and Trading Center, and experience the thrilling flower auction there.

Reporter Guo Linjie from the front desk: I am currently in the auction and trading hall of Kunming International Flower Auction and Trading Center. In the 160000 square meter venue, there are two auction halls with 12 trading clocks rolling in real-time. The 900 trading seats are almost fully booked, and the auction starts at 1pm every day, with peak hours lasting until 9pm or 10pm.

There are hundreds of flower brokers here, connecting 25000 suppliers and 3000 buyers nationwide. They buy flowers according to the different needs of buyers from various channels and earn price differences from them.

Wang Hao has been working as a flower broker for over a decade and currently supplies 50 customers. Like Wang Hao, flower brokers need to keep their eyes fixed on electronic clocks. The real-time scrolling big clock displays information on the current flower categories, levels, transaction prices, and suppliers being traded. Here, the flower auction adopts a "Dutch style auction", also known as a "discounted auction".

The large circle in the center of each screen is called an electronic trading clock. The trading clock starts counting down from the starting price, and the cursor rotates on the circle to display the continuously decreasing price. The buyer presses the button on the table to bid, and once someone presses the button, it indicates a successful transaction, and the cursor will stop. The first bidder completes the transaction, making the auction timing very delicate. If the auctioneer waits too long and wants to get a lower price, they will be preempted by other buyers. On average, a transaction is completed every 4 seconds here, which can be said to be a battle of slow hand speed.

Wang Hao auctions for six or seven hours every day. Before the auction, he goes to the warehouse to check the level of the flowers. With a flashlight, he can more clearly see the openness of the flowers, the freshness of the petals, and the length of the stems. He records the good quality product numbers and batches, and calculates his psychological price. Each broker has their own "auction list", where they cross out each type of flower they want until all the flowers they want are sold, and then they can place an order or send out the jacquard.

The flowers that have been photographed will be packed and sent to various places by small trains, and these mechanized transportation and packaging routes greatly reduce the circulation time.

Zhu Qi, the planning manager of Kunming Huapai Center: First of all, from the perspective of the overall situation, our Huapai Center has over 6 million branches and flowers every day, which are distributed to various parts of the country, most provinces and cities, and also covers Southeast Asia, including Japan and other regions in the Asia Pacific region. 30% of the transaction volume in the Huapai Center comes from various e-commerce platforms.

The demand for fresh flowers continues to increase, and the consumption of high-quality varieties is rising rapidly

According to statistics from the Flower Auction Center, the daily flower auction volume ranges from 5 million to 6 million branches, with a transaction volume of over 4.5 million yuan. Recently, in addition to business demand, the demand for household and daily flower purchases has continued to increase, and consumers are showing a younger trend. Recently, with the arrival of summer, the preference for fresh and elegant light colors for flowers has also tended to be pink, purple, champagne, and so on.

Like some famous varieties, flower shops and farmers used to be hesitant to enter, but in recent years, the demand for high-quality varieties has increased, and high-end A and B products have been increasing year by year.

Innovation drives "Cloud Flower" to move from traditional production to high-quality development

In recent years, the floral industry in Yunnan has gone from a slow pace to a rapid rise, achieving a transformation from traditional production to high-quality development.

From 2010 to 2018, the overall growth rate of Yunnan's flower production value remained at 12%, reaching its peak in 2019 with a growth rate of 42.9%, the highest in nearly a decade. In 2022, the output value exceeded 110 billion yuan, doubling compared to 2018. The flower production volume has remained the top in the country for 29 consecutive years, becoming a flower production center, price formation center, trading and circulation center, and technology innovation center in China and Asia. With the accelerated development of Yunnan's floral industry, some floral enterprises have collaborated with relevant scientific research institutions to carry out technological innovation based on their own reality, and have developed new technologies and equipment that have significantly improved quality and efficiency, are easy to operate, and save time and effort. Follow the reporter to visit a modern rose industry park and see the technological content behind the flowers.

Prince Xi, Deputy General Manager of Anning North Ward Flower Industry Co., Ltd.: Yes, it is currently the highest production time of the year. We can currently achieve a daily output of 300000 branches, so the workshop needs to work until 11 pm to finish the day's work and ensure that all the flowers picked every day are processed.

Wang Zixi told us that to ensure the freshness of flowers when they reach consumers, the first step after picking is to perform pre cooling treatment.

Prince Xi, Deputy General Manager of Anning North Ward Flower Industry Co., Ltd.: This temperature is a cold environment of 4-6 degrees. If flowers have hot fields, their opening speed is very fast. Therefore, slowing down their opening speed through such a cold environment is called dormancy, allowing our flowers to have more time for processing, logistics, and processing in the next stage.

After staying in the cold storage for 4-6 hours, fresh cut flowers will enter this modern sorting workshop, which currently adopts a human-machine cooperation mode and produces 30 million fresh flowers annually.

In order to improve sorting efficiency, the workshop is equipped with intelligent sorting equipment for fresh cut flowers. According to factors such as flower openness, size, color, and stem length, flowers are divided into different levels, greatly reducing production costs.

Prince Xi, Deputy General Manager of Anning North Ward Flower Industry Co., Ltd.: These flowers are all tall, short, fat, and uneven. We use image recognition technology and three cameras to scan our flowers 360 degrees. This scan can accurately achieve ABCD level classification when the flowers come out from the other side. The accuracy is very high, reaching over 99%.

Graded flowers will be manually graded and then packaged into bundles. On the assembly line, skilled workers can pack a bundle of flowers every 10 seconds.

In this modern rose industry park, every step from planting, sorting, to packaging and sales is undergoing innovation and upgrading to enhance the quality and competitiveness of Yunnan flowers.

Prince Xi, Deputy General Manager of Anning North Ward Flower Industry Co., Ltd.: Our greenhouse is the largest single plant greenhouse in Asia, covering an area of 158 acres. We achieve intelligent control through fully automated water and fertilizer integration control, as well as environmental automatic control. For example, at night, although there are no workers in our entire greenhouse, the automatic sensing probe inside the greenhouse captures real-time changes in temperature, light, water and humidity. After it is transmitted to the central control center, our central control system will automatically control the environment of the greenhouse, such as opening and closing windows or activating the ventilation system, eliminating the need for workers to work at night.

In the laboratory of the park, bottling experiments are conducted every day to cultivate flowers with longer bottling periods.

The longer the vase period, the better the flowers cultivated in the base. The base will understand the average bottling period of a certain variety with the market side. If the variety cultivated by oneself has a shorter time compared to it, it will provide feedback to the planting side to identify where the problem is. In addition, in order to break the monopoly and pricing power of foreign flower varieties, Yunnan is also making efforts to develop new flower varieties with independent intellectual property rights.

Prince Xi, Deputy General Manager of Anning North Ward Flower Industry Co., Ltd.: In Yunnan, there has always been soil planting. In the past three years, the entire Yunnan market has been undergoing soil free cultivation transformation. This soil free cultivation has greatly improved the quality of Yunnan flowers, increased their value, and increased their income. Even practitioners from other industries are willing to join this industry, which has driven their economic income.

Online sales have become a new trend in flower sales

Yunnan's fresh flowers were once mainly sold to first tier cities in China, but now the demand in second - and third tier cities is also growing rapidly. More and more people are accustomed to buying flowers online, and the flower industry is undergoing an evolution from traditional offline retail models to online e-commerce models. Next, let's get to know a young person who started a flower e-commerce business in Dounan.

Zhou Qi, Retail Manager of Flower E-commerce: I entered the flower industry in 2018 and came to my current company. Because of my love for flowers, I also fell in love with the business of selling flowers.

Zhou Qi is the manager of e-commerce retail for this company. The company used to mainly engage in traditional flower wholesale business, serving wholesalers and flower shops. Seeing the continuous expansion of the market size of flower e-commerce, the company gradually moved its business online in 2018 and began selling flowers to household retail users.

The transformation from wholesale to retail has also brought about a shift in user concepts. Zhou Qi, who has just joined the e-commerce industry, found that retail users pay more attention to the quality and freshness of flowers, and stable quality and comprehensive service are the key to attracting customers. Zhou Qi's team has established a dedicated after-sales group, which is more convenient and targeted for conducting after-sales claims. But to fundamentally reduce customer complaints, it is necessary to ensure the quality of the flowers. Therefore, strict standards must be implemented in every link from picking, quality inspection, processing to warehousing and logistics.

Zhou Qi, Retail Manager of Flower E-commerce: C-end individual users hope that this flower will bloom as soon as it is taken back for cultivation, so its openness requirements need to be higher. C-end users usually have a vase of 20-30 centimeters in their home, so the length of this flower for us C-end users is usually about 60-65 centimeters.

In addition to holiday and business needs, flower consumption is becoming more routine. Zhou Qi observed that some customers can purchase flowers once a week, and young people are the main force in flower purchasing, with a single order price of around 50. The rise of daily consumption demand for flowers has steadily increased the order volume of e-commerce platforms, and has also brought challenges to warehousing and logistics.

In order to cope with unprecedented large-scale flower shipments, Zhou Qi's team uses a data-driven and information-based collection system to improve the efficiency of distribution and shipment. At the same time, information-based platforms also provide accurate understanding of the terminal market, thereby better meeting the diverse and personalized needs of users. For different festivals, corresponding bouquets have also been designed to be popular.

Zhou Qi, Retail Manager of Flower E-commerce: The mugwort bouquet, which symbolizes blessings and home safety, we launched during the 2019 Dragon Boat Festival, sold very well. For enterprises, it is important to cultivate internal skills and improve themselves from multiple dimensions such as product, operation, service, warehousing, and shipping. We must not fall into a price war.

Recently, there have been many e-commerce festival activities, and Zhou Qi is testing and selecting products every day. Although she is busy until late at night, she is still full of enthusiasm.

Zhou Qi, Retail Manager of Flower E-commerce: I believe that our industry will continue to improve in the future, with more standardized products and more personalized needs of users being met.

In recent years, what factors have played a decisive role in the rapid development of Yunnan's floral industry? What kind of vitality does Yunnan's floral industry reflect in China's economic development, from traditional production to high-quality development? Pok a video, listen to the interpretation of Wu Sa, Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics at the China Academy of Macroeconomics ↓