Chinese enterprise develops rubber market in Southeast Asia

At 3:30 a.m, 27-year-old Lamuli gets up. Half an hour later, when he rides his motorbike to a rubber plantation a few kilometers away, the temperature in the early morning of Sabah in Malaysia is suitable for tapping. Lamuli’s job is to draw a machete across each of the 600 rubber trees to allow the latex to flow into cups. If the weather is good, he can finish his work within three hours.

The rubber plantation is located in Keningau where is about 150 kilometers away from the tourist city Kota Kinabalu. Here, there are more than 400 rubber workers like Lamuli. Each worker has an average of 1800 tree per day to work on, to completing a work cycle in three days.

Lamuli had worked as an air conditioning repair technician in Kuala Lumpur 4 months ago before he started working for Jianningou. He earns 2,000 ringgit a month (1 US $ 3.89 ringgit). Malaysia was the world’s third largest producer of natural rubber after Thailand and Indonesia, but in recent years, due to the continuous low price of natural rubber, a lot of rubber farmers switched to palm trees and other cash crops. Coupled with the Government’s active development of rubber gloves industry and other downstream industries, fewer and fewer people are engaged in tapping businesses, and the rubber planting area has been reduced year by year.

However, the current downturn has not stopped Chinese Guangdong enterprise Guangken Rubber Group. Since 2008, Guangken Rubber cooperated with the local company, Polian Woods, and invested hundreds of millions of yuan to rent 30,000 hectares of land and has introduced Chinese nursery technology to develop natural rubber cultivation. Its rubber park is one of the largest natural rubber plantations in Malaysia.

Lai Xionghui is the general manager of the joint venture Guangken Rubber (Polian) Company Ltd. He said that Southeast Asia’s unique climate conditions is very favorable for developing rubber industry, thus it has a high yield. Now there are about 77,000 rubber trees ready for tapping in the plantation. Lai Xionghui said that the scale effect will reduce cost as more trees are available for tapping. The company plans to increase the number of rubber trees to 2 million in the next few years, and more tapping workers will be needed by then.

The rubber plantation in Keningau, Sabah is not the first project of Guangken Rubber in Southeast Asia. In recent years, the enterprise took advantage of the rubber price downturn and market integration opportunities to enter Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, and is now one of the world’s largest natural rubber industry chain enterprises. Lai Xionghui said that the company plans to set up a rubber factory to process some high value added rubber products locally. “The most important thing is that the local people see that we are ready to invest here longterm.”

Chinese source: Xinhua; Editor: Wang Shixue