China Focus: Innovative storage, delivery services drive China's logistics

BEIJING, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- In China, delivery within the day or next day is common, which is supported by the hard work of couriers and innovative solutions.

At the ongoing China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, advanced logistics and delivery applications such as drones and intelligent warehouse modules catch the eyes of the visitors.

DRONES FACILITATING DELIVERY

A six-rotor multi-purpose network-connected drone with the maximum loading weight of 20 kg was displayed at the exhibition booth of the express delivery service China Post. Integrating a high precision positioning device, millimeter wave radar and visual perception system, it can meet a wide range of application needs in the fields such as delivery, search and rescue, and mapping.

Meanwhile, approximately 1,500 km far away from the CIFTIS venues, China Post has used its drones to facilitate fruit farmers efficiently transporting their crisp plums out of the orchards in mountainous regions of Wushan County in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

Taking the fruits along the set trajectories, the drones shortened the transportation duration from the orchards to the airport to eight minutes from 90 minutes when taken by road. And 24 hours are enough for consumers to taste the fresh fruits since they placed orders.

Previously, the transportation of crisp plums in Wushan County mainly relied on road transportation and shipping, which were slower and not able to guarantee the fruit quality.

"We hope to introduce our crisp plums abroad and let the world know the quality of our crisp plums in the future," said Chen Wenming, a fruit farmer at Wushan County.

"As a strategic emerging industry, low-altitude economy has high sci-tech content and concentrated innovation factors," said Xie Song, a project manager of China Post's delivery department, adding that they used the emerging technology of drones to build a "low-altitude transport network."

China Post has set up a drone transport and delivery team, equipped with multiple types of drones which have flown for 16,000 sorties and transported more than 160 tonnes of freights. The company has piloted the use of drones for terminal deliveries in the provincial-level regions of Anhui, Chongqing, Jiangsu and Sichuan.

SMART WAREHOUSING SERVICES

China's courier sector surpassed the 100-billion-parcel mark this year much faster than the previous year. The milestone was reached on Aug. 13, 71 days earlier than in 2023, according to the State Post Bureau (SPB).

The booming logistics and delivery demand could not be met without smart and highly efficient warehousing services.

During this year's CIFTIS, Chinese express delivery companies brought their solutions or products to showcase their capabilities in parcel sorting and delivery. Among them, the STO Express introduced its unmanned delivery system and automatic sorting system.

At the exhibition booth of STO Express, a Rail Guided Vehicle (RGV) is in automatic operation. Such device, independently developed by the delivery service company and designed for the online business, can increase more than 50 percent of sorting grids compared with the Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) and greatly improve the utilization rate of the warehouse space.

Besides, the company also independently developed a super warehouse intelligent management system to serve more than 300 selected warehouses covering 56 cities nationwide, with a storage area of over 2 million square meters. Such sorting system has processed and shipped a total of 100 million orders.

JD Logistics brought an interactive system of the virtual logistics parks to the CIFTIS to simulate the operation process of commodity warehousing and packaging, storage and picking, sorting and delivery, as well as carbon neutrality in real JD Asia No. 1 intelligent logistics parks.

Since the first logistics park of JD was put into operation in Shanghai in 2014, more than 40 have been established across the country.

In a JD Asia No. 1 park covering more than 500,000 square meters at Kunshan, east China's Jiangsu Province, the automatic sorting center with over 80 sorting lines and 10,000 intelligent sorting robots enhances the sorting accuracy to 99.99 percent.

Running around the clock, the automatic sorting center has the capacity to process more than 4.5 million parcels per day.

Meanwhile, in another such park at Beijing, the Order Storage Retrieval device, covering an area of 2,700 square meters and storing 1 million items at most, can process up to 800 orders per hour, which is six to eight times more efficient than manual picking. Newly introduced digital product orders may be processed at the park and sent for delivery. ■