Haimai, launched in 2012 by processor Qingdao Guoxing Foodstuff Group, is reporting strong growth in sales thanks to rising public anxiety over food safety.
Sourcing seafood from Argentina, Denmark, Iceland and Norway – among other locations – Haimai has become one of the most recognizable brands in Chinese supermarkets. It has seen rising sales recently in response to increasing demand for imported seafood in the wake of numerous food safety scandals emanating from China’s aquaculture sector.
Investing in the lucrative future of online seafood sales in China, Haimai has signed supply deals with key online retailers like Jingdong.com, Yihaodian.com and Womai.com, and also operates its own consumer-facing e-commerce website, www.buyingsea.com, under the slogan ‘Buy Imported, Rest Assured.” Packaged, frozen products it offers on Womai include 120-gram and 400-gram packs of Canadian cold-water shrimp retailing for CNY 18 (USD 2.59, EUR 2.49) and CNY 30 (USD 4.31, EUR 4.15).
Maintaining a strategy of business diversification, this year, it opened of a string of ‘Haimai’ brand-name stores in Shanghai intended to both raise sales and drive consumers to visit the firm’s various online stores. Guoxing also operates its own trawlers and claims to be China’s leading fisher of Arctic shrimp.
Based in Qingdao and led by Li Hongwei, founder and head of the Qingdao Guoxing Foodstuffs Corp., Haimai is an example of Chinese firm successfully shifting from China’s processing sector into distribution. Haimai products are sold in the frozen foods counters in approximately 300 high-end large-scale supermarkets in North China, Northeast China and East China, including a high-end store run by Beijing Hualian Supermarket and mainstream Beijing Hualian supermarkets. It also supplies other stores, including Beijing Huatang, Carrefour, RT-Mart, Lotte Mart and China Resources Vanguard.
So far, Haimai has concentrated its expansion plans in China’s north and along its east coast, but this year, Haimai listed on the SME-focused stock exchange (commonly known as the ‘Third Board’) in Shenzhen in order to raise cash for further expansion. A prospectus for investors published for that listing described Haimai as “pioneering” and a means of giving Qingdao Guoxing Foodstuff the means to exploit opportunities in global seafood procurement.
For the company’s management, the biggest opportunity lies at home in China. In a statement made recently to Qingdao’s most popular evening newspaper, Qilu Wan Bao, Haimai management said the company is betting that China’s share of global seafood supply will jump from 35 percent in 2015 to 50 percent in 2019, making China the biggest buyer of seafood in the world.
Haimai’s marketing in China makes its sales strategy clear: promising “fresh and healthy imported seafood products,” and referencing “marine ecology” and “sustainable seafood,” Haimai is betting that China’ rising middle class is increasingly willing to spend more to buy imported seafood they consider cleaner and safer than seafood produced domestically.
