“In China, the idea of high-quality development encourages us to cooperate with the R&D centers and tech companies with the vision to push the industry further, and to give consumers healthier and better products,” Larry Chan, Chairman of Liwayway (China) shared insight into the trends in the Chinese market with GDToday during the Asia Youth Leaders Forum held from March 25 to 27 in Guangzhou’s Nansha.
Chan highlighted two major trends in the food sector of China, saying, “The healthy trend in China is very strong, even stronger that some developed countries in Asia. People are more willing to pay more for healthier products. Moreover, the product has to be much more relevant to the consumers.”
With the technological advantages in China, Chan said the company is able to come up with much more innovative products.
“We are able to design a production line that can use the paste type of flavor and directly apply onto the product. For example, I just visited Guizhou. They use a lot of natural spices and mushrooms in their cuisine. With this technology, we can be able to apply that complex set of ingredients onto our products so we can tell the Guizhou history and the Guizhou story in a much better fashion,” he elaborated.
Liwayway, a long-lasting snack brand from Philippines, entered the Chinese market in 1993 with two operations in Shanghai. Having operated in China for three decades, Larry Chan discovered drastic changes in the business environment of China, especially in its second-tier and third-tier cities.
“We started from Shanghai and expanded to other capital cities considering their well-developed facilities. We now found that the third-tier cities also have good business environment with active government services,” he said.
According to Chan, the company has set up two factories respectively in De’an county of Jiangxi province and Hong’an county of Hubei province. “We are about to start the third phase of construction in the De’an factory while we have just launched the second phase of construction in the Hong’an factory，”he said.
Although the labor cost in China is not as cheap as before, Chan elaborated the efficiency of its supply chain is high enough to make up with the cost.
In addition, Chan spoke highly of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and considers it an important platform to attract the attention of governments and exchange information with countries along the BRI.
“We obviously benefited from the BRI. As a Philippine company, we were more familiar with the Southeast Asian market. But then we discovered through the BRI that South Africa and countries such as Uzbekistan are also highly potential markets. Our factory in Uzbekistan is about to start operation soon, which could never happen without the BRI,” said Chan.
Being the very first Philippine company to enter China, Liwayway has been dedicated to the friendly relations between China and Philippines.
Chan considers the bilateral relations will remain strong in terms of people-to-people exchanges, business and tourism, saying, “Philippine companies are looking for opportunities to China as a market or as a supply chain while they are also becoming more hopeful now to bring in more Chinese companies into the Philippines.”
Reported by Jasmine
Video by Qin Shaolong
Edited by Wing, Steven
