Cherry festival income almost 3.3 bn yuan

The total income from cherry sales and related farm-based tourism activities at the just passed 2017 Dalian (Lushunkou) Cherry Festival amounted to 3.26 billion yuan ($480 million), a year-on-year growth of 16.4 percent.

Thirty thousand tons of cherries were sold during the festival and accounted for 280 million yuan ($41.68 million) of that total.

The local government explored new methods for selling cherries. Two hundred and eighty agricultural e-shops and 23 rural e-commerce service stations were launched on alibaba.com and JD.com.  

Lushunkou also joint with S.F Best of S.F Express, a logistics service provider in China, to set up a nationwide O2O (online-to-offline commerce) delivery system, which helps to ship cherries directly from gardens to customers’ homes.  

According to incomplete statistics, more than 6,000 of the 30,000 tons of cherries sold were sold online, a year-on-year rise of 20 percent, and 500 more were sold via the B2C mode, a year-on-year growth of 40 percent.

The festival drew over 1.88 million visitors to Lushunkou, 13.2 percent more than the year before.