“Durian, mangosteen, coconut and other tropical fruits produced in ASEAN have high sweetness and good taste, and are increasingly favored by Chinese consumers. This year, our company’s import of ASEAN fruits has exceeded 1 billion yuan, achieving substantial growth.” Li Lin, vice president of Xinrongmao Fruit Technology Group Co., Ltd., said in an interview.
Recently, the 2026 “Shared Big Market·Export to China” – “ASEAN Fruits Gathering in Guangxi” series of activities were held across Guangxi.
From June 17th to 20th, fruit suppliers and trader representatives from China and ASEAN countries had in-depth exchanges and expanded cooperation opportunities.
Guangxi has accelerated the construction of a cross-border fruit trade industry chain supply chain with complementary advantages and mutual benefit by holding cross-border traceability, production and marketing docking and investment promotion conferences, releasing the “Guangxi White Paper on Expanding ASEAN High-Quality Agricultural Imports”, and launching ASEAN cross-border fruit normalized cold chain trains.
Wei Tao, Chairman of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, said at this event that Guangxi is the “gateway hub” for ASEAN fruits to enter the Chinese market. With the completion and opening of the Pinglu Canal in September this year, Guangxi’s advantages in the world of thoroughfares will become more prominent, and he is willing to cooperate with ASEAN.
All parties in the alliance will work together to continue to optimize the cross-border trade environment and create an efficient docking platform for high-quality ASEAN agricultural products to enter the Chinese market, allowing consumers to buy more, more affordable and fresher ASEAN fruits, and making fruits a “sweet link” to deepen China-ASEAN cooperation.
In this event, it became a consensus to expand the scale of ASEAN fruits entering the Chinese market through Guangxi channels.
Li Lin believes that currently, the influence of ASEAN fruits in the Chinese consumer market continues to increase. At the same time, due to climate, latitude and other reasons, it is difficult to replace tropical fruits with Chinese domestic products in the short term. The development potential of China-ASEAN fruit trade is huge.
In the China-Malaysia Durian Day and the First Malaysian Durian Festival (Nanning Station), Leong Chi-hao, executive director of the Malaysian International Durian Industry Development Federation, organized a number of durian traders to participate with special durian varieties such as “Red Shrimp” and “Kunbao”.
Every Musang King durian on display was picked from a Malaysian orchard and flown directly by air through the entire cold chain, realizing the extremely fast fresh delivery model of “ripened on the tree + direct air transportation”.
Liang Zhihao said that since Malaysian fresh durians were exported to China for the first time in 2024, the country’s fresh durian exports to China have continued to rise.
At the same time, the planting area and output of durian in Malaysia have doubled, and the sales price has become more affordable.
According to Fatil Ismail, Consul General of the Consulate General of Malaysia in Nanning, in recent years, China has continued to maintain its position as the world’s largest durian consumer market, and more and more ASEAN countries hope to share the development opportunities of this huge market.
He said that Malaysia will continue to explore innovative ways to bring high-quality durians such as Musang King and Blackthorn to Chinese consumers and create “Hermès in the durian industry.”
Pham Thanh Binh, Ambassador of Vietnam to China, also suggested that Vietnam and Guangxi should speed up cooperation in railway, highway, shipping and logistics, speed up the construction of smart ports, further unblock the circulation channels of products from Vietnam and ASEAN countries to China, improve customs clearance efficiency, promote the development of cross-border e-commerce, and allow all parties to share the development opportunities of China’s ultra-large-scale market.
Liu Taifang, secretary-general of the Thailand-China Agricultural Trade Association, is optimistic about the development potential of the fruit deep processing industry.
He said that currently, most fresh fruits such as Thai durians enter China through ports such as Pingxiang in Guangxi. Thailand is actively planning to extend the deep processing industry chain in Guangxi and increase the supply of ASEAN fruit juices, cakes and other processed categories to China.
“The Chinese consumer market is very large, and we look forward to more cooperation with China in coconut deep processing.” said Bagong Zantayasakorn, President of Aikoco (Thailand) Co., Ltd.
Wei Tao said that next, Guangxi will join hands with ASEAN to promote the in-depth application of artificial intelligence in orchard monitoring, cold chain dispatching, market forecasting and other fields, promote “hard connectivity” of infrastructure and “soft connectivity” of rules and standards, and empower the high-quality development of the fruit industry.
