Chenguang Biotechnology Group Co., Ltd. has been deeply engaged in the plant extract industry for many years, and has obtained more than 300 patented technologies through unremitting innovation and creation, which has promoted the high-quality development of enterprises. How does the company continue to maintain a competitive edge? How does the plant extract industry achieve high-quality development? The reporter recently interviewed the chairman of the company Lu Qingguo.

Question: According to the report of the 20th National Congress of the CPC, high-quality development is the primary task of comprehensively building a modern socialist country. How to view the development prospects of plant extract industry?

Lu Qingguo: 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, and 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.

Plant extract is a subdivision industry of agricultural industrialization, which is an industry that extracts effective ingredients from plants and processes them into products. Plant extracts are widely used in medicine, health care products, cosmetics and other fields, and have the characteristics of "doing one after another". China's plant extract industry started late, in the 1990s, plant extraction production enterprises are small, low technical content, mostly manual workshop production, product quality is uneven. After 2000, China's enterprises rely on independent innovation, gradually improve the production method and production process, and gradually make the plant extract industry into a large-scale, continuous, automated industry, production costs have been significantly reduced, and product quality has been continuously improved. In 1997, China's export volume of plant extracts was only 50 million US dollars, and last year it increased to more than 3 billion US dollars, accounting for less than 3% of the global market to 20%. The compound growth rate of the global plant extracts market is more than 10%, while the compound annual growth rate of China's plant extracts market is as high as 15%. At present, China is engaged in the import and export of plant extracts of more than 2,000 enterprises, exports of more than 10 million US dollars there are more than 50, China has developed into the world's first plant extract raw materials supply country.

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

Lu Qingguo: The Party and the state attach great importance to the industrialization of agriculture. The No. 1 Central document issued this year emphasizes: "Implement the action to upgrade the agricultural product processing industry" and "guide large agricultural enterprises to develop intensive processing of agricultural products." We think the emphasis is on the word "profound". For example, in the past, the production of plant extracts mostly extracted a single component from plants, such as extracting capsicum red pigment from chili pepper, extracting stevia glycoside from stevia leaves, and extracting lutein from marigold chrysanthemum, etc., plant resources have not been fully utilized, and there is still a very large space for development. We found that shikimic acid can be extracted from ginkgo biloba leaves as well as flavonoids. The oligosaccharides and gossypol of cottonseed can also be developed when cottonseed is made into depowdered protein, cottonseed oil and other products. Many plant raw materials can be comprehensively utilized, and extracting new products on the basis of no increase in raw material cost input can not only obtain multiple economic benefits, but also save a large amount of waste disposal costs.

With the advancement of plant extraction technology, many abandoned plant raw materials can be used. In the past, the processing capacity was limited, and the cost of processing a ton of raw materials was tens of thousands of yuan, but with the scale and specialization of extraction technology, the processing cost dropped significantly. For example, some rhizome Chinese medicinal materials, the leaves used to throw away, in fact, there are some effective ingredients in the leaves, but the extraction cost is too high before it is not worth it, the future of these resources can be used.

In addition, many of our plant extraction enterprises have been built in border minority areas, contributing to local farmers' poverty alleviation and national unity. For example, Chenguang Biology built a factory in Shachai County, Xinjiang, and helped more than 50,000 local households and more than 200,000 people get rid of poverty through the order planting model of "company + base + cooperative + farmers".

Reporter: There is no limit to scientific and technological innovation, in the future development, how can China's plant extract industry continue to maintain competitiveness?

Lu Qingguo: The world's scientific and technological competition is a competition for national strategic scientific and technological strength. In the plant extract industry and technology, in the past, we have been following the West, what we can do is to expand the scale, reduce costs, these are from "1 to 10" things. With the breakthrough of plant extraction technology in China, some research and development achievements have entered the "no man's land", and we are doing new products, new applications and new varieties from "0 to 1". Like stevia leaves, green hydrochloric acid is extracted simultaneously when stevia glycosides are extracted, and flavonoids are extracted from marigold chrysanthemum residue. These two original innovations can replace antibiotics and fill the gap left by the withdrawal of antibiotics from the feed industry. Taking marigold as an example, China's planting area is about 600,000 mu, producing about 40,000 tons of marigold chrysanthemum residue every year, the content of flavonoids in marigold chrysanthemum 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 progress of Chinese research technology, we are not only leading in technology, but also in the market size. I hope to take the lead in technology in the future and maintain the competitiveness of China's plant extract industry in the world.

To this end, Chenguang Biology has introduced more than 300 high-tech talents and built 25 scientific research platforms such as enterprise technology centers, postdoctoral research workstations, and national and local joint engineering laboratories. The company's annual investment in research and development exceeds 100 million yuan, has obtained more than 300 patented technologies, developed more than 100 products in 6 categories, and won 40 provincial and ministerial level science and technology awards. Among them, the "Key technology and industrialization of high-value extraction and separation of pepper natural Products" and "Innovation and application of key technology for tomato processing industrialization" won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2017, and the "Innovation and Industrialization project of supercritical process technology and equipment for pepper Extraction" won the 2020 China Industry Award Recognition Award. Through innovation and creation, it promotes the high-quality development of enterprises. (Song Meiqian, Economic Daily)