Li Hao

    JULY 18, Sri Lanka Pavilion Day at the Shanghai Expo: A Shenzhen man is received by D.M. Jayaratne, the prime minister of Sri Lanka, for his extraordinary role in procuring Sri Lankan coffee and tea.

    Wu Zhibiao, 44, was able to bring an encyclopedic knowledge of the ubiquitous drinks to the meeting.

    An ex-soldier, Wu has been involved in the coffee business for 10 years. He is now a big player in the industry, procuring foreign coffee and tea for domestic buyers. He regularly receives orders in excess of 160 million yuan (US$24 million).

    But he didn’t just fall into the business.

    Always wearing a smile, Wu describes his story as bittersweet — rather like the drink itself.

    Before getting to where he is today, Wu was a farm produce market employee, a driver, a failing businessman and a coffee apprentice.

    Ups and downs

    Born into a poor family in Hainan, Wu became a border soldier in Guangxi after graduating from middle school.

    Demobilized two years later, Wu returned to Hainan, where he worked at a local farm produce market.

    He soon found it was impossible to feed his family on his 48-yuan salary, so he decided to go into business.

    He procured corn from northern China, which he transported to sell in Guangdong, making his first fortune.

    Wu then invested all his earnings in a plastics factory in an inland city. But the factory went bankrupt within a year.

    “I was naive at that time and had no knowledge of the inland investment environment,” Wu says.

    First taste of coffee

    Frustrated by his loss, Wu went to Zhuhai and became a driver. It was there that he met a Malaysian businessman, who taught him his first lesson about coffee.

    “He told me there would be a huge coffee market in China and that it had taken only about 10 years to see coffee shops spread all over Malaysia,” Wu says.

    Inspired by this pep talk, Wu started his market research into the demand for coffee.

    In 1999, he used the 8,000 yuan he had earned by driving to procure coffee from Guangzhou. He sold it to bars and Western-style restaurants in Zhangmutou, Guangdong.

    “It was really hard then. I had to go to Guangzhou two or three times a week, using a trolley to peddle my goods door to door,” he recalls.

    Wu also traveled to Hong Kong to study the coffee and milk tea industries, learning from coffee and black tea masters who charged 800 yuan a day for their instruction.

    “I learned that all high-quality milk teas were made with black tea from Sri Lanka. Hong Kong has been consuming Sri Lankan black tea for more than 100 years,” Wu says.

    In 2000, at an international black tea and coffee exhibition in Shanghai, Wu met business representatives from Sri Lanka. After some hard bargaining, Wu established a business relationship with the Sri Lankans that remains strong 10 years on.

    A tale of three factories

    Wu used the earnings from his door-to-door peddling to open a coffee processing factory in Longgang District in 2003, preparing for a brand-new start.

    But the SARS epidemic in 2003 kept people away from restaurants and bars, leading to a sharp decrease in coffee purchases.

    To make matters worse, following the SARS panic, Wu’s newly refitted factory had to be demolished to give way for public housing. Wu failed to acquire any government compensation as his business licenses were incomplete.

    Not to be put off, Wu began refitting a factory at a new site, but this site turned out to be too close to main roads and broke new, stringent food industry regulations.

    “I thought of giving up at that point, but just couldn’t,” Wu says.

    With a soldier’s persistence, Wu relocated his factory to Pingshan in Longgang.

    The three relocations rendered Wu unable to pay his workers, so he sold shares in his company to an investor.

    But by this time it was 2008, and the global financial crisis prompted the investor to cash out from the venture.

    Suddenly at sea, Wu took out a bank loan backed by the Longgang District Government, which also paid for Wu to visit a coffee and black tea exhibition abroad.

    Wu’s coffee career finally took off.

    Meeting the Sri Lankan Prime Minister at the Shanghai Expo made Wu proud.

    “When the prime minister gave me his name card, I felt proud to be a Shenzhen entrepreneur,” Wu says.

    Bigger dream

    Wu supplies Sri Lankan coffee and black tea to many large domestic enterprises and has reached a supply deal with Perfetti Van Melle Confectionery, a Fortune 500 enterprise.

    “I have spent 10 years pursuing cooperation with Fortune 500 enterprises,” Wu says.

    “I am in talks with Disney about a confectionery order and I’m confident I’ll land it.”

    But Wu is not yet satisfied: he’s thinking much bigger.

    “I hope one day to become China’s No. 1 supplier of coffee and black tea,” he says. He clearly means business.