Orange entrepreneur: When in doubt, innovate!

By Shen Yuan, Yichang International Communication Studio

Zhou Dainian from Yichang’s Xiangxiang Village is exploring modern methods for selling oranges, and also creating new opportunities for local villagers.

In 1990, after graduating from high school, Zhou bought a motorcycle and began selling oranges. At that time, transport issues and a lack of information flow meant that oranges from Xiangxiang Village – where he had grown up – had a hard time finding buyers. Zhou would bring merchants from other places to the village to buy oranges.



In 2006, scarcely anybody came to the village to buy oranges. So the resourceful Zhou hired a truck to transport a big load of local oranges to Kaifeng City in Henan province, 650 kilometers away. Once he got there, he sold 10,000 kilograms of oranges in less than an hour.

After this encouraging start, Zhou started thinking seriously about developing the market. In 2007, he invited several classmates to form a marketing team. Three years later, the village’s orange sales network had expanded to more than 30 cities across China, including Beijing, Wuhan, Shenzhen and Shanghai.



At that time, many orange sellers differentiated themselves on price, lowering prices to attract customers. Zhou was keen to go the quality route instead: he wanted to help fruit farmers adapt their planting to market demand.

In 2010, Zhou set up a "cooperative + members + base" cooperative, fusing together in an integrated ecosystem orange planting bases, agricultural distribution centers, orange wax factories and packing workshops.



Local villagers work as orange planters and also share dividends from the cooperative which has so far signed up 3,200 members from 19 villages.

In 2012, the cooperative began to develop contract farming. High-quality, standardized oranges have a larger, more stable market.

In 2015, offline sales began to hit a bottleneck: too many intermediaries and long circulation times were negatively impacting profits. In response, Zhou set up an e-commerce operation department. In 2020, 60 percent of the cooperative's orange products were sold online.



Today, the cooperative buys and sells about 50,000 tons of oranges every year. It not only sells oranges from Xiangxiang Village, but from various places across China as well. The cooperative has become a national orange trading hub, generating annual revenue of more than 200 million yuan (US$27.4 million).

Three Gorges Daily's Chen Lu contributed the original Chinese story for this report.