Newsmaker
Fruits of a growing ambition
By Yu Tianyu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-12 09:58
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Wu, who described himself as a son of the deserts, became one of these adventurers and has been seeking gold in the barren lands for farmers ever since.
After 20-years of working for a government department, he started his own business.
Taking advantage of his networks within the government bureaucracy, Wu set up an innovation and development group consisting of many top scientists and professors in Inner Mongolia.
He then rented a sparsely-inhabited 500,000-mu desert at Alashan, one of the major epicenters of China's sandstorms. One mu is 0.1647 of an acre.
Wu planned an economic model for the barren land. "I wanted to employ local farmers to grow haloxylon ammodendron," he said, referring to the drought-resistant plant with an ability to survive sandstorms and fix sand dunes as a counter to desertification. "The cistanche, a parasitic plant found on its roots, can be sold as a valuable Chinese traditional herb," he added.
Wu also encouraged the cultivation of Sophora alopecuroides, also a desert-born plant, used in the making of anti-cancer medicine and other products. He wanted farmers to raise sheep and camels for extra cash.
In addition, Wu had ambitions to build a scenic resort catering to western tastes and based around a three-star hotel.
Wu established Yongye in 2003 in a flurry of projects, patents and passion.
"Initially, I was not very clear about how to manage an enterprise, but my previous experience enabled me to know how a good enterprise could crash and how a bad enterprise could become successful," Wu said.
Wu had plenty of experience in managing assets of State-owned enterprises worth tens of billions of yuan as well as individual projects from his time working for the local government department. However, he says it made him overconfident.
He said: "I paid the price for my great appetite for a big company and several projects. In May 2004, the capital stream for Yongye broke down when the government squeezed my credit loans."
Shengmingsu
Recalling the difficult time, Wu reflected: "Dreams are beautiful, but reality can be cruel. But honesty and reliability are fundamental for Yongye and me."
Some of Wu's partners and colleagues gave him their own savings and some creditors lent more money without asking for interest or tenures.
Shengmingsu for plants is a patent-pending chemical that stabilizes and helps mix fulvic acid with nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, boron and zinc. It is able to boost their yield by 10 to 35 percent and also shorten harvest times by 15 to 20 days. The acid can be extracted from brown coal.
The world's brown coal reserve is estimated at 1,000 billion tons. There are 212 billion of them in China. Brown coal accounts for about 13 percent of the country's coal reserves and is mainly located in the eastern Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
However, China has paid little attention to brown coal because of its high moisture content, sometimes as high as 66 percent, and high ash residues. Further, carbon dioxide emissions from brown coal are generally much higher than for black coal.
"It is a way of turning waste into something valuable," Wu said. "I believe Shengmingsu will definitely gain popularity as it is in line with the government's environmentally-friendly notions and also with the policies for improving farmers' lives."
Wu received three million yuan from a commercial bank and started concentrating on Shengmingsu production.
Again, the road proved to be littered with obstacles.
"At the beginning, I simply thought that here is a good product that can help farmers to increase their yields so we provided them with free samples for a year's use. When they saw the good results we thought they would be happy to buy the product the following year," Wu said.
Things didn't work out quite like that. "Farmers cherish their crops more than their lives and they didn't dare to take a such risk," Wu said.