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We market our products through three primary methods: direct contact with foreign and domestic businesses, attendance at international exhibitions, and sales made through trade websites. Our marketing and sales teams work closely together to maintain a consistent message to our customers.
The sales team is divided into three subdivisions, focusing on the sales of fruit juice concentrates, fruit beverage products and derivative products.
We sell our fruit juice concentrates both domestically and internationally, while we have only sold our fruit juice beverages domestically. We sell our products either indirectly through distributors with good credit history or directly to end-users.
Our export business is primarily comprised of fruit juice concentrates. The export of our fruit juice concentrates is handled internally by our international trade department, which has 20 employees.
The North American and European markets represent a large portion of apple and pear concentrate consumption. The U.S. market is a highly mature market with stable growth for apple concentrate. Although we sell to distributors in the PRC, and therefore are not certain exactly where our exported fruit juice concentrate products are ultimately sold, we believe that the volume of exports to the United States of our fruit juice concentrate products has increased annually since 2004. The European market, which we believe has a generally stable consumer base, has been a target market since our inception. Apple concentrate is used to produce many beverages and wines consumed by Europeans. The Middle East is also a target market for our apple juice concentrate.
In fiscal year 2011, we believe we exported approximately 31% of our fruit juice concentrates, a decrease of 12%, as compared to approximately 43% in fiscal year 2010, which is primarily due to a decrease in demand of concentrated fruit in the international market. We believe our main export markets for apple and pear concentrates are the United States, Europe and the Middle East. We believe we have stable relationships with our distributors and end-users in those markets.
The Chinese market drives our fruit beverage sales most beverages are sold through provincial, city and county-level agents. We also sell directly to hotels, supermarkets and similar outlets in smaller quantities. The fruit beverage sales are carried out by a team of 45 employees. Historically, we have only sold our fruit beverages regionally in Shaanxi Province and some neighboring cities in the PRC. One of our strategies is to broaden the geographic presence of our brand-named fruit beverages and expand production and sales of higher margin fruit beverages in the PRC.
Our kiwifruit products are targeted at the European, Southeast Asian, South Korean, Japanese, Middle Eastern, Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese markets. The growth of our kiwifruit concentrate and kiwifruit beverages has exceeded the growth rate of any other product we offer. |
