Day 13 – Tea Plantage and Brasport

Today we started our day with a short introduction and a Chinese crash course by our new guide Mrs Wong (English name: Phoebe). She sang us a song about a girl, which represents the Yan-Minority. The interesting thing about this story is, that 80% of the women wear their hair about one meter and they only cut it ones in their lifetime at the age of 18. She also informed us that Guilin has over 33 Mio visitors per year although Guilin has only 5 Mio habitants. 20’000 of these habitants are tour guides for tourists. Imagine that – 0.4% of the habitants are working as tour guides for the tourists.

After this interesting presentation we arrived at a Tea-Plantation. After a few photos of the Tea Plantage itself, we had the chance to experience a traditional tea preparation and we also had the possibility to taste four different flavours of tea. To finally round up this tea experience we went to the showroom where we could buy all the teas we tried and also all other flavours they are offering.

Tea-Plantation

Tea-Degustation

After a short lunch – which was arranged on short notice, because our train was cancelled and we, therefore, had to book an earlier one. Continuously, we went to the company Brasport which produces leather goods and 95% of them are leather straps for watches. Their clients are well-known Swiss watch companies. Pascal, CEO of Brasport China, informed us that they produce goods at very low costs but in the end the main client sell them for the price of 5 times or higher. This is a very high margin compared to other branches. Nevertheless, they produce in average 1.5 Mio straps per year. Additionally, they import their resources exceptionally from Europe.
Brasport company logo
Brasport production
Pascal furthermore told us, that when he came to China a few years ago, he was confronted with several cultural and economical challenges. However, he started to solve those issues with good ideas and converted the old production line step-by-step (which is named Kaizen) into a Lean-Production. Not only we could see the production, but also we learned that in China you face a few problems which you can solve by logically thoughts.
Leather straps

At 6 pm it was time to board the train to Guangzhou. Because of the shortage of space our group was separated into two groups. One had soft beds and the other one hard beds for sleeping. It was very interesting to see the different standards and how the differented classes are treated. Anyway, before going to bed we had a great time together in the train.

 

Written by Stefan Ackeret, Sarah Ehrensperger, Dominic Hasler, Melani Zadro


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