It is being billed as China’s first online seafood auction house. And a 300-ton batch of West African seafood was the first sale on the Dalian Dapai Online Auction Co. (www.dldpa.com) this month.
Dapai aspires to be China’s one-stop shop for seafood in the same way online players have popped up for agricultural commodities.
“Customers can see the product and monitor the prices in real time,” Dapai founder Wei Bin told a Dalian TV news program. Wei thinks Dapai will ultimately be a price-setter in the Chinese seafood market.
The Dapai website has been welcomed by the Dalian Industry and Commerce Bureau as a means to “increase the professionalism of the industry and transparency around pricing,” according to the bureau’s Wang Da Wei, who monitors Dapai.
Dalian is home to the country’s key agricultural commodities exchange with a focus on soy and palm oil trades and local government has sought to grow the city’s role as a trading center and price-setter as China’s demand for agricultural commodities grows.
