South China Morning Post
Jane Zhang
A farmer plays with his grandchild while plucking tea leaves at a tea garden in central Hubei province’s Enshi city. Local farmers live on planting tea on the 47,390,000 square metre tea gardens. Photo: Xinhua
Jinli Tea, a small company in the Hubei provincial city of Lichuan, has become the first Chinese company to operate a branch in the northern African nation of Morocco, as it takes advantage of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to expand offshore in search of growth opportunities.
Jinli now operates five packaging lines in Morocco with the annual capacity for 3,000 tonnes of tea, after investing US$8.2 million in the country since late 2015. The Moroccan branch contributed about 60 million yuan (US$9 million) of revenue last year, said Jinli’s chief executive Wang Qimao.
“Our main products are still for export, so we went to Morocco and thought we must open the western Africa market through the country,” Wang said in an interview with South China Morning Post in Lichuan.
With a population of 36 million people, Morocco is the gateway to northern and western Africa, importing 77,562 tonnes of Chinese tea last year, about one fifth of China’s total tea exports, according to the China Tea Marketing Association.
