Plant Extract Industry Has Great Potential

Wecistanche Biotechnology Group Co., Ltd. has been deeply involved in the plant extract industry for many years. Through unremitting innovation and creation, it has obtained more than 300 patent technologies and promoted the high-quality development of the company. How can the company continue to maintain its competitive advantage? How can the plant extract industry achieve high-quality development? The reporter recently interviewed the company's chairmanChilly Hong.

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Reporter: The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that high-quality development is the primary task of building a socialist modern country in an all-round way. How do you view the development prospects of the plant extract industry?

Chilly Hong: After years of development, China's economic aggregate has been greatly improved, and it has entered a new normal of qualitative improvement from quantitative expansion. The importance of high-quality development has become increasingly prominent. Promoting high-quality development is not only an objective requirement of the law of economic development, but also an important direction for the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.

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Plant extracts are a sub-industry of agricultural industrialization, which is an industry that extracts active ingredients from plants and processes them into products. Plant extracts are widely used in medicine, health products, cosmetics and other fields, and have the characteristics of "doing one after another". china plant extract industry started late. In the 1990s, plant extract production enterprises were small in scale and low in technology. Most of them were hand-made workshops, and the quality of products was uneven. After 2000, Chinese enterprises relied on independent innovation to gradually improve production methods and production processes, and gradually made the plant extract industry into a large-scale, continuous and automated industry, with a significant reduction in production costs and continuous improvement in product quality. In 1997, china plant extract exports were only US$50 million, but last year it had increased to more than US$3 billion, and its share in the global market increased from less than 3% to 20%. The global plant extract market has a compound growth rate of more than 10%, while china plant extract market has an annual compound growth rate of more than 15%. At present, there are more than 2,000 companies engaged in the import and export of plant extracts in my country, and more than 50 companies have an export volume of more than US$10 million. my country has developed into the world's largest supplier of plant extract raw materials.

Reporter: The plant extract industry is a typical agricultural and sideline product processing industry, with one end connected to the countryside and the other end connected to the market. Where should the focus be placed to achieve high-quality development?

Chilly Hong: The Party and the State attach great importance to agricultural industrialization. The Central Document No. 1 issued this year emphasizes: "Implementing the action to improve the agricultural product processing industry" and "guiding large agricultural enterprises to develop deep processing of agricultural products." We believe that the key lies in the word "profundity". For example, in the past, plant extract production mostly extracted single ingredients from plants, such as extracting capsanthin from peppers, extracting steviol glycosides from stevia leaves, and extracting lutein from marigold flowers. Plant resources have not been fully utilized, and there is still a lot of room for development.
After research, we found that ginkgo leaves can extract shikimic acid while extracting flavonoids; cottonseed can be made into de-powdered protein, cottonseed oil and other products, and cottonseed oligosaccharides, cottonphenol, etc. can also be developed. Many plant raw materials can be used comprehensively. Extracting new products without increasing the cost of raw materials can not only obtain multiple economic benefits, but also save a lot of waste treatment costs.

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With the advancement of plant extraction technology, many plant raw materials that were abandoned in the past can be used. In the past, processing capacity was limited, and the cost of processing one ton of raw materials was tens of thousands of yuan. With the scale and specialization of extraction technology, processing costs have dropped significantly. For example, some rhizome Chinese medicinal materials used to be thrown away when their leaves were not used. In fact, there are some effective ingredients in the leaves, but the extraction cost was too high before. In the future, these resources can be used.

In addition, many of our plant extraction companies are built in frontier ethnic minority areas, contributing to the poverty alleviation and prosperity of local farmers and ethnic unity. For example, Wecistanche Biology built a factory in Shache County, Xinjiang, and helped more than 50,000 households and more than 200,000 people in the local area to get rid of poverty through the order planting model of "company + base + cooperative + farmer".

Reporter: There is no end to scientific and technological innovation. In the future development, how can china plant extract industry continue to maintain its competitiveness?

Chilly Hong: The world's scientific and technological competition is a competition of national strategic scientific and technological strength. In the plant extract industry and technology, we have always followed the West in the past. All we can do is to expand the scale and reduce costs. These are things from "1 to 10". With the breakthrough of china plant extraction technology, some research and development results have entered the "no man's land". We are making new products, new applications, and new varieties from "0 to 1". For example, when extracting steviol glycosides from stevia leaves, green hydrochloric acid is extracted simultaneously, and flavonoids are extracted from marigold flower residues. These two original innovative products can replace antibiotics and fill the gap left by antibiotics after they are withdrawn from the feed industry. Taking marigold as an example, china planting area is about 600,000 mu, and about 40,000 tons of marigold flower residue are produced each year. The content of flavonoids in marigold flower residue is 6%. If all the flavonoids are extracted, its market prospects are very broad. In the past, plant extracts were basically applied abroad and processed in China. Now with the advancement of China's research technology, we are not only leading in technology, but also in market size. I hope to maintain the international competitiveness of china plant extract industry with technological leadership in the future.

To this end, Wecistanche Biotechnology has introduced more than 300 high-tech talents and built 25 scientific research platforms such as the enterprise technology center, postdoctoral research workstation, and national and local joint engineering laboratory. The company's annual investment in research and development exceeds 100 million yuan, and it has obtained more than 300 patent technologies, developed more than 100 products in 6 categories, and won 40 provincial and ministerial science and technology awards. Among them, "Key Technology and Industrialization of High-Value Extraction and Separation of Natural Products of Pepper" and "Innovation and Application of Key Technology for Industrialization of Tomato Processing" won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2017, and the "Chili Extraction Supercritical Process Technology Equipment Innovation and Industrialization Project" won the 2020 China Industrial Award. Through innovation and creation, the high-quality development of the company has been promoted.