Just after Valentine's Day (February 14) and the Chinese Lantern Festival (February 15), it was still a busy scene in Kunming's Dounan Flower Trading Hall, the largest flower market in China. On February 17, our colleagues from HortiDaily China paid a visit to this market in the Yunnan province where 80% of the Chinese flowers are traded and exported to over 50 countries and regions.
Over the years, Dounan Flower Trading Center has developed into a powerful complex, integrating auction, logistics, agricultural materials, tourism, and so on. It is also the only flower trading industrial park in the world that uses different transaction modes of Internet + e-commerce: auction transactions, electronic unified settlement, and counterpart transactions. On the trading floor, buyers are engaged in intense transactions.
Approximately more than 1,600 varieties of 41 categories of fresh-cut flowers are traded in Dounan every day. All of that together represents more than 80% of fresh-cut flowers in Yunnan Province, on top of flowers coming from neighboring provinces and Southeast Asian countries. The export of Dounan flowers has also covered more than 50 countries and regions.
Yunnan Province is the main supplier of flowers in China. In recent years, the province has vigorously built a more convenient transportation network, promoted the construction of a radiation center facing South Asia and Southeast Asia, and laid a solid foundation for "Yunnan flowers" to go out of the province. Express couriers such as SF Express, Yunda Express, and YTO Express can be seen everywhere in the park. The perfect logistics cold chain system ensures the fast transportation of flowers. For individual buyers, the merchant also provides a delivery express logistics service, which is very convenient.
The packaged flowers were sent to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other cities.
To facilitate merchant transactions, the park also launched the Huashangbao Application, a one-stop comprehensive service mobile software specifically designed for flower market enterprises and related practitioners. The app supports online scanning and billing, generates electronic bills, and retrieves first-hand industry transaction information in real-time.
The sellers at the market said that this year's New Year's flower sales were really good. This with the addition of Valentine's Day and the Lantern Festival, many flower shops were sold out. This results in prices that are higher than in previous years. On top of that, there is a growing demand for high-quality flowers. The wholesale price of a bunch of 20 roses, for example, can reach more than 200 RMB (around 31.5 USD / 28 euro).
Outside the door of the trading hall, tricycles are waiting for the transfer of flowers, and each vehicle has its own pass.