Abstract: With a focus on improving the quality of rural residents’ consumption and addressing the challenges of limited sales channels for agricultural products, ZTO Express is accelerating the expansion of its express delivery business into rural areas.It is promoting the “Express Delivery into Villages” project, facilitating the integration of production and sales, promoting agricultural-commercial interconnection, establishing smooth channels for the flow of agricultural products into cities and industrial goods into rural areas. The aim is to enhance the convenience of rural consumption, reduce rural consumption costs, increase the prices and reach of more agricultural products, activate the rural market in both directions, and contribute to rural vitalization.

Challenge

Express delivery is a bellwether of modern logistics, uniquely positioned to serve agriculture, rural communities, and farmers — the three rural pillars — and plays a vital role in rural revitalization.

 At the decisive stage of building a moderately prosperous society, ZTO Express (ZTO) aligned with the central government’s poverty alleviation drive by aggressively expanding into rural markets under its Express Delivery into Villages initiative, accelerating the rollout of rural service points, extending last-mile networks, raising rural logistics coverage, and opening two-way channels for agricultural products to reach urban markets and industrial goods to flow into the countryside — delivering high-quality rural logistics as a bedrock for poverty alleviation and rural revitalization.

Solution

ZTO has systematically expanded its rural service network. By end-2019, it operated nearly 30,000 service points with over 4,800 direct network partners, reaching more than 98% of counties and districts and over 90% of townships — the broadest, deepest, and densest private express delivery network in China. 

Core measures include: (1) advancing the Express Delivery into Villages initiative with standardized township service points and expanded rural delivery services to meet growing demand; (2) leveraging its bridge role for agricultural products to cities and industrial goods to villages — accelerating market penetration to raise rural consumption convenience and quality while lowering costs; and (3) promoting production-to-market linkages and agribusiness connectivity, using e-commerce platforms to further open agricultural product distribution channels and unlock two-way rural market potential. 

ZTO’s evolving express + rural e-commerce + specialty agricultural products + farmers model integrates its ZTO Commerce and ZTO Media resources, harnessing e-commerce platforms, group buying, and live-streaming sales to solve the bottleneck of agricultural product distribution, help impoverished regions develop pillar modern agricultural industries, raise farmer incomes, and sell agricultural products at higher prices over greater distances. 

In 2019, China’s One Region, One Product express-delivery-for-modern-agriculture program generated 163 projects each exceeding one million parcels annually, and rural areas cumulatively handled over 15 billion express parcels supporting RMB 870 billion in agricultural-industrial product exchange.

Impact&Value

Poverty alleviation: Express delivery into villages has been embedded in China’s national poverty alleviation architecture, boosting rural e-commerce through expanded delivery networks and technology enablement, enabling specialty agricultural products to reach consumers nationwide at minimal cost with full chain management from farm to table. ZTO’s model effectively resolves the distribution bottleneck for agricultural products, lifting incomes for farmers in impoverished areas.

Industry development: ZTO’s backbone network accelerates online-offline integration, fostering the experience economy and the sharing economy; the deep fusion of traditional express delivery with e-commerce platforms has ignited rural market potential, making express delivery a major force in stimulating rural consumption and prosperity. 

Public recognition: ZTO participated as a logistics representative at the inaugural National Consumption-Driven Poverty Alleviation Month launch ceremony; its farmer-assistance services, its role as a fresh force in post-IPO poverty alleviation, a celebrity village Party secretary’s warehouse live-stream that sold RMB 1 million of poverty-alleviation red wine in two minutes, and couriers leading fellow villagers out of poverty have all been widely covered by Xinhua News Agency, China News Service, Dahe Daily, and other mainstream media — demonstrating the responsibility and tangible contributions of Chinese express delivery enterprises to national strategy.