China Logistics News: Why has China's cold chain not developed when all resources such as demand and supply are abundant? Some experts believe that it is because the cold chain industry started late, but the development speed of most emerging industries in China is by no means slower than the "Shenzhen speed"; others believe that the cold chain standardization system has not been established and sound, but this cannot be justified.

Last week, 120 tons of seafood from Guangxi’s Beibu Gulf took a cold chain train from Fangchenggang Station in Guangxi to Dahongmen Station in Beijing, realizing the normalization of the seafood cold chain train from Guangxi to Beijing, and the railway cold chain train for Beijingers to eat. Cheap Beibu Gulf seafood.

Currently, the author is participating in the planning of the sea-rail combined transport between Changji-Hun Railway and Zarubino Port in Russia, as well as the high-speed rail passenger transformation project of light trucks. After the completion of this project, the low-cost and high-quality railway cold chain will also allow consumers in Beijing to eat cheap Japanese seafood.

The world should not be unfamiliar with the concept of "cold chain". From food safety to drug safety, cold chain is inseparable. Cold chain is storage, transportation and distribution in a specific low-temperature environment, and guarantees the availability of agricultural products, food, medicines and biological products. Quality, but such a simple expression of the cold chain has been experiencing frequent problems recently. What happened to the Chinese cold chain?

In terms of time, starting with the comprehensive development of the cold chain in the 2008 Olympic Games, the cold chain has been in China for eight years, and the development time is long enough; in terms of economic strength, China has become the world's second largest economy in terms of economic strength. GDP is as high as 67.67 trillion yuan, and the economic environment for cold chain operation is sufficient; in terms of consumption capacity, the total retail sales of social consumer goods in 2015 reached 30.1 trillion yuan, and consumption alone far surpassed Japan, the third-ranked country in the world by GDP. , And the luxury goods market accounted for 46% of the world's consumption, reaching 116.8 billion US dollars. In addition, if calculated on the basis of the fresh agricultural product market, which accounts for the largest share of the applied cold chain, the transaction scale of fresh food e-commerce alone will reach 56 billion yuan. Estimated with a 10% market share of fresh food e-commerce, the consumption of fresh agricultural products in 2015 The amount should exceed 500 billion yuan, and there is a strong demand for driving the rapid growth of the cold chain; from the perspective of investment capacity, the national fixed asset investment reached 55 trillion yuan in 2015, an increase of 10.0% over the previous year, and the capital conditions for investment in the cold chain are mature; In terms of return on investment in the cold chain market, it is estimated that by 2020, the annual output value of the global cold chain market will reach US$271.9 billion, and the market prospects for return on cold chain investment are broad.

Various statistics show that my country’s cold chain has no reason to fail to develop, but the actual situation is difficult to be optimistic. Statistics from the China Federation of Things show that in 2015, the cold chain circulation rates of fruits, vegetables, meat, and aquatic products in my country were 10%, 26%, and 38%, respectively, while the cold chain circulation rates of European, American, Japanese, and Korean cold chain circulation rates for agricultural products and fruits and vegetables were respectively 95% and 98%, the gap between them is obvious. Although China's per capita GDP is only US$8,280, it is not much higher than the per capita income of these European and American countries when they established a complete agricultural cold chain system. It can be seen that the reason for the low proportion of cold chain logistics in China is not here.

Why has China's cold chain not developed when all resources such as demand and supply are abundant? Some experts believe that it is because the cold chain industry started late, but the development speed of most emerging industries in China is by no means slower than the "Shenzhen speed"; others believe that the cold chain standardization system has not been established and sound, but this cannot be justified. Although in China, it is difficult to unify more than 200 cold chain logistics standards formulated by various industry departments due to the fragmentation, but before the establishment of the European Union, the cold chain standards of European countries are also different and varied, and the China National Standardization Committee compares configuration specifications High, each link of the cold chain has corresponding standards, and standard unification is also being substantively carried out; some people say that because the government does not have enough food safety supervision, the "Food Safety Law" promulgated by the Chinese government should be the most severe punishment in the world Some people say that the degree of informatization is insufficient, but when the European and American countries formed a complete cold chain system, there are still 30 years away from the rise of the Internet; the most ridiculous argument is that the concentration of Chinese cities is insufficient, and the population density cannot support the cold chain. However, Beijing alone has a population of tens of millions, which exceeds the total population of Canada. Others believe that most cold chain links are operated by manufacturers, processors and retailers themselves, and it is difficult for third-party cold chain logistics companies to cultivate. SF Express The Cold Transport Division was established at the beginning of the year, and the target value of the pharmaceutical cold chain at the end of the year is 400 million yuan.

Therefore, these so-called problems are not the key elements missing from the cold chain.

In March this year, after ten ministries and commissions including the National Development and Reform Commission jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Strengthening the Construction of Logistics Shortcomings to Promote Effective Investment and Resident Consumption", the author once said in an interview with the media that the "Opinions" "The generalization is sharp and to the point, but none of the proposed solutions can really land. Take the agricultural product cold chain as an example. According to the well-known ""barrel theory", due to the "broken chain" of the cold chain, the shortcomings of most high-input cold chains in individual links will result in low returns or even negative returns for the entire system. .

At the same time, due to the unreasonable and unbalanced structure of the cold chain infrastructure, once a cold chain system is formed, it is prone to "broken links". Take fresh food e-commerce as an example. Although fresh agricultural products have strong customer stickiness due to frequent transactions, they have formed a highly attractive, high-margin, and booming emerging market, but in fact, the net profit of fresh food e-commerce is extremely low. Statistics show that the cost of cold chain transportation accounts for more than 40% of the total cost. As a result, only 1% of the 4,000 domestic e-commerce companies are profitable, and 95% of the fresh food e-commerce companies are in a state of "losing money and earning praise".

Due to the long chain of the distribution system of agricultural products from the origin to the consumer and the huge cold chain system, it is difficult for a single enterprise to independently cover the entire cold chain, and the "tragedy of the commons" has appeared. Regarding the cold chain logistics of agricultural products, whether it is field picking and pre-cooling, preliminary processing and pre-cooling, or the "cold tally area" at the junction of cold storage and cold transportation, there will be no enterprises due to the multi-subject "tragedy of the commons" of ownership. Willing to invest but only use, thus exacerbating the weakening of the investment in the breakpoint link of the enterprise, and finally evolving into a system "tragedy" of the entire cold chain.

It seems that the core of the problem clearly points to the dislocation of the investment subject of cold chain infrastructure. The European and American countries have been very cautious and cautious in national public financial investment, but they have adopted the method of investing all or most of the national public financial investment in agricultural cold chain infrastructure investment. In recent years, my country has spared no effort to invest in the construction of public railway infrastructure, and even in the areas of investment that should be borne by enterprises themselves, it has also been led by the government, such as incentives for technological innovation and policy subsidies for new energy and new materials. However, investment in cold chain infrastructure, which should be invested by the state’s public finances, is extremely low, resulting in excess capacity in related industries.

With the overall cold chain storage capacity of 37 million tons and 90,000 cold transport vehicles across the country, the current development of the cold chain has problems: the repeated construction of some cold storages, while the social cold chain infrastructure is seriously lacking. At present, the investment of individual companies in cold chain infrastructure is only concentrated in cold chain links with short supply chains and full coverage, or shared cold chain infrastructure supported and driven by high profit margins such as pharmaceutical cold chains. The investment in the overall cold chain infrastructure and the continuity of the "broken chain" can only evoke other follow-up investments in the fast and high-yield cold chain link only by increasing national public financial investment, so as to allow the rapid development of the missing Chinese cold chain. stand up.