How online shopping minted Tonglu’s billionaires and made it China’s happiest county
Tonglu, with a population of about 400,000, is home to four of the biggest courier companies in China. The four companies together delivered more packages than the entire US combined.
Tonglu in China’s eastern coastal province of Zhejiang has achieved the distinction of being the country’s “happiest” county for three consecutive years from 2015.
The ranking by the China Institute of City Competitiveness had coincided with the exponential surge in e-commerce activity across the country, which created huge demand for express parcel delivery and logistics companies known as kuaidi – the hometown business of Tonglu.
Four of China’s biggest courier companies – STO Express, YTO Express, ZTO Express and Shanghai Yunda Express – are based in Tonglu, located on the banks of the Fuchun River. The county is an 88-kilometre drive away on the G25 road from the provincial capital of Hangzhou, where e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding is headquartered.
The Tonglu gang, as the four companies have come to be known, processed a combined 15.4 billion parcels in 2016, which was 18 per cent more than the total 13 billion units handled in the United States in the same year.
While Alibaba and online shopping rival JD.com have adopted big data analytics and artificial intelligence to help raise the efficiency of their own logistics operations, human couriers are still required to get packages into the hands of individual consumers.
Such demand has enabled entrepreneurs in Tonglu, with a population of about 400,000, to build China’s express delivery industry, which handled 101 million parcels a day last year. China has been the world’s largest market for courier services since 2014.