Many farmers in rural China have faced immense difficulty maintaining a suitable income during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, momentum picked up for those farmers who were able to use live-streaming via apps in order to advertise and sell their products, such as fruit, to potential customers.
Popular apps used include privately-held Kuaishou and Alibaba-owned Taobao (NYSE: BABA). JD.com (NASDAQ: JD), China's largest online retailer, began partnering with Kuaishou in May with efforts to help agricultural merchants specifically.
An app-focused shopping trend via live-stream videos actually started in China toward the end of 2017. Today, despite some setbacks related to censorship, the country's live-streaming economy is altogether a multi-billion dollar industry.
In fact, at least hundreds of millions of users in China regularly shop this way. Figure-wise, "62% of the country's over 900 million internet users are using online live-streaming service," as many as 560 million as of March 2020.
More than one million users sell products from rural areas in China via live-streaming, undoubtedly made possible in part considering that over 98% of China's poor areas have had access to the internet since August 2019. Rural China is disproportionately impoverished.
One such example of this type of success can be seen with livestreamer Zhang Hai.
On a recent afternoon in Hunan Province, Zhang Hai promoted Mayang oranges via a live-stream video, oranges that he'd purchased from local farmers after the produce wasn't selling as a result of economic difficulties due to the coronavirus.
According to China Xinhau News, a typical video such as that reaches as many as 50,000 viewers and results in 2,300 orders within as little as two hours, with the fruit delivered 48 hours later.
On a weekly basis, Zhang Hai claims that he sells around 1.5 million kilograms of oranges (the equivalent of 1,500 metric tons).
While rural farmers in China didn't begin advertising and selling their produce via live-streaming during the coronavirus pandemic, dire economic circumstances created an environment that's allowed this type of innovative marketing to flourish even more.
It's not expected that this trend will go away. In fact, it may continue to bloom.
China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs projects that e-commerce sales of agricultural products, including fruit sold via live-streaming apps, will reach 800 billion yuan (or more than 1.1 billion U.S. dollars) annually by the end of 2020.