Putian people spent 40 years to build China's timber empire

天启

People from Putian, Fujian are well-known for their business skills. It is said that there are more than 2 million people from Putian doing business abroad. There are many industries in China that are controlled by Putian people, and timber is one of them. According to statistics, there are nearly 200,000 Putian people doing timber business abroad all year round, operating more than 80,000 enterprises, and their voice can be said to be very strong.

Suifenhe in Heilongjiang is known as the "Chinese Wood Industry Capital". In fact, it is not only Suifenhe. If you have been to the Northeast, you will find that there are southerners with southern accents everywhere, from Mudanjiang in the east to Manchuria in the west and Mohe in the north. They are Putian businessmen. They can endure hardships and have resources. Many people dug their first pot of gold in the timber business in the Northeast forest.

In the 1880s, there was a saying in the Greater Khingan Range in the Northeast that "a train whistles, and gold is worth a thousand taels", which refers to the timber business. With their keen sense of smell, the people of Putian found this place, traveled through the deep mountains and old forests, and then established various relationships to load the cheap birch and larch there into trains and sell them to big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

From the beginning of three or five carloads per month, it developed to 20 to 30 carloads per month. Take a cooperation with a Beijing company as an example, a businessman can make 200,000 or 300,000 yuan a year. Not only that, they never miss any business opportunities in details. In 1987, a fire broke out in Daxinganling. The people of Putian seized the opportunity to rush there, bought all the burned wood, shipped it out, and made a lot of money from it.

As the business developed more and more prosperous, the ambitions of the people of Putian gradually grew, and they set their sights on foreign countries. Because winter is the logging season in Russia, the supply of wood is the most abundant and the price is lower. For example, Russia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Canada, and New Zealand, at this time, as a port for importing wood, Suifenhe played an important role.

Unlike transportation in Northeast China, overseas transportation mainly goes by water. The logging team composed of Putian timber merchants transports trees cut down from Russia and other places to China by ship. Large wholesalers buy goods overseas, and one ship is tens of thousands of cubic meters, with an annual turnover of tens of billions.

Since the 1990s, especially from 2000 to 2010, China's annual average gap in production and construction materials has been very large, and the demand for timber has entered a peak period. Putian merchants have formed a sales network covering the whole country.

The amazing part is not just that. After opening up the upstream and downstream raw material supply and sales, the smart Putian people have maximized the value of timber. Timber raw materials are valuable, but if the timber is made into exquisite handicrafts, it becomes completely different.

Most of the timber imported by Putian people from Russia is ordinary construction timber such as ash, while those imported from Southeast Asia, Africa and other places are precious timber such as mahogany. Rosewood can be made into furniture or carved into fine craft wood carvings. Putian has therefore been awarded the titles of "China Woodcarving City" and "China Classical Craft Furniture Capital".

Rosewood often takes five or six hundred years to mature and is facing serious depletion. It is almost a non-renewable resource. Coupled with the time-consuming and labor-intensive labor costs, rosewood has changed its appearance and its value has increased several times, and it is getting more and more expensive. Some people even buy it as a luxury or even a financial product, waiting for appreciation.

It is said that rosewood that is shipped back to China by chartering a ship for several thousand yuan per ton can be sold for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan per set after being made into furniture. The price increase is as high as 10 times or 100 times. The degree of profiteering can be imagined. In this way, the entire industry chain has brought huge profits to Putian's timber business. The locals once made a metaphor that "a piece of wood is better than a piece of gold".

If we say that the people of Putian were forced to go to neighboring countries to look for forest sources because of the poor agricultural conditions there. After all, there were no fish there near the sea, and the landform lacked water and often could not grow anything, then later, they developed the industry to more distant foreign countries, which was a manifestation of mature vision.

One generation made a way, and the next generation continued. When doing business abroad, Putian merchants with a strong clan culture took care of each other, relatives brought relatives, friends brought friends, and once business opportunities were found, they would make money together. To this day, Putian people occupy about 80% of the national timber market, and Putian timber merchants control 70% of the world's red wood raw materials. It is no exaggeration to call it a "timber empire".

And the simple timber business later became wood carving and became a pillar industry in Putian City, which was probably something that the earliest Putian people who started businesses never expected.