Profile: Vegetable vendor's epic path to e-commerce queen

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by Xinhua writers Lyu Qiuping, Wang Nian and He Wei

NANNING, July 18 (Xinhua) -- More than 20 years ago, Luo Cuimei, sold vegetables for a living in her hometown in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. She still plies her trade, but hardly in the same old way.

In the past, she would get up early and carry the vegetables to the market on her shoulders. These days, Luo sells them online, with her e-commerce industrial park reaping 100 million yuan (14.3 million U.S. dollars) of annual sales revenue.

Now aged 40, Luo is from the Mulam ethnic group and grew up in a remote village in Luocheng, the only Mulam autonomous county in China.

Covering a wide area of karst topography and suffering from serious rocky desertification, Luocheng has low agricultural yields. Combined with poor transport interconnectivity, this makes it one of the most impoverished counties in Guangxi.

China aims to eradicate absolute poverty this year. One trend that is bringing that goal closer is the growth in e-commerce platforms connecting farmers and customers. This means farm products of higher quality and with more added value are being sold at much higher prices, lifting numerous farmers out of poverty.

HARD WORK PAYS OFF

Luo started selling vegetables at the age of 13 during school vacation. That year, her mother began suffering from serious joint pains but was too poor to see a doctor.

Luo gathered over 10 kg of green onions from their field, trekked several miles to town and sold them, bringing home four yuan.

"My father burst into tears when I delivered the cash. At that very moment, I was determined to get rich, so that my parents would no longer have to worry about money," she said.

Luo dropped out of senior high school and became a full-time vegetable vendor in 1999. She would get up at 4 a.m. every day, carry her vegetables to the market using a shoulder pole, and sell them at very low prices.

However, she soon found a better business model, arranging to sell directly to local restaurants.

"Compared with waiting all day in the market for customers, I found delivering vegetables to the doorsteps of restaurants more efficient and profitable," Luo said.

In less than three months, she earned more than 8,000 yuan. It was a huge sum of money back then, almost enough to build a house.

In 2001, leaving almost all her money to her parents, Luo boarded a packed train and traveled dozens of hours to Zhejiang, a coastal economic hub in east China where her cousin had married and settled down.

"I was longing to see the trains and high-rise buildings that she had told me about, and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life selling vegetables deep in the mountains," she said.

In Zhejiang, she took jobs in factories manufacturing metal products, electronics and clothes before deciding to start her own clothing business.

"It was an era of abundant opportunities. I saw my boss, who could barely survive at the start of the year, buying a high-end sedan at the end of the same year."

With her savings, Luo rented a storefront in the provincial capital of Hangzhou and sold clothes that she had purchased at wholesale markets in the cities of Yiwu and Wenzhou. During the first year, the store brought her tens of thousands of yuan in profit.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

In 2008, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer.

"I felt very guilty because I had spent little time with my parents. So, I decided to return home to be with them for the rest of their lives."

Back home, Luo tried several businesses, including a clothes shop, a cafe, a hotel and a supermarket, before starting once more with vegetable sales.

"Seeing the farmers toiling in the fields and bringing in meager incomes, just like I used to, I decided to do something to get local vegetables and fruits recognized by the market," she said.

Local farm produce was normally healthier, being organic and unaffected by industrial pollution, a fact that could be used to gain competitive advantages in the market.

To get some inspiration, Luo returned to Hangzhou, where she found most of her former peers in the clothing business had taken advantage of the growing trend in online shopping. By this time, Hangzhou, home to the e-commerce giant Alibaba, had become an internet technology center.

"I was surprised to find residents there bought vegetables simply by scanning QR codes with their mobiles, allowing them to trace the origins of the products and make payments," she said.

In September 2016, armed with this new knowledge, Luo started the first e-commerce company of Luocheng.

Luo traveled to various parts of the country for training in e-commerce, learning how online shopping worked. She also took the opportunity to convince companies in other parts of China to buy products from her area.

Within the first year, she won a 10-million-yuan contract from a company in the city of Shenzhen, the first big order of her company.

With more orders flowing in, Luo persuaded local farmers to grow products, such as snow peas, to order for particular customers, adding some 5,000 yuan to the per capita annual income of local villagers.

The farmers receive guidance on their plantations, with agricultural experts providing tips by way of video clips. The use of pesticides and fertilizers is banned.

"We are given the seeds and have the products purchased right on the farmland. All we have to do is grow the peas as instructed and count the money," said Li Zhenqiong, a local villager and one of the snow-pea growers.

To date, Luo's company has set up 71 e-commerce service stations in impoverished villages, acting as distribution centers for local products, boosting the incomes of 20,000 poverty-stricken people.

From 2015 to 2019, about 82,000 residents in Luocheng shook off poverty, with the poverty rate reduced from 28.47 percent to 2.21 percent in the county.

Luo has also been invited to give lectures to entrepreneurs, poverty alleviation cadres and college students.

"It's a regret that I didn't go to college. I expect talented young people like them to join in the innovation of 'the internet plus agriculture.' They are the hope for agriculture in mountainous regions," she said. Enditem

(Xinhua reporter Huang Haoming contributed to the story.)

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