One’s flesh is another person’s poison – this proverb is correct for people’s reaction to durian. You either hate the pulpy, sweet and stinky fruit, or you like it very much, so it is made into gold through the export.

In May, China decided to allow the import of Malaysian durians. Since then, fruit traders in China and Malaysia have been pioneering innovation in the billion-dollar durian market.

The expansion of the export portfolio extends beyond the range of frozen pulp and puree, which is what drives the Malaysian co-founder of the durian seller DKing, Leron Yee Poh Soon, and his colleagues. During the harvest season, they only sleep for three hours a day.

Every day, they pick fruit from a 1,000-acre (66.7-hectare) orchard in Raub, which is only two hours’ drive from Kuala Lumpur and sorts the fruit according to strict selection techniques and transports it to Ports and processing plants.

Malaysian whole durians

Soon, the durian export was all the rage. He only picked up the high-quality fruit known as the A-class Musang King and then exported it to China. Each fruit is tied to the tree with a rope so it does not fall and cracks prematurely.

However, for a relatively small businessman like Soon, it is not easy to compete with Thailand’s dominance in the durian export market. His approach is to work with the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba Group, which has committed to promoting cross-border trade among SMEs through various digital tools.

“Obviously, Tmall and Tianhe Fresh Food (both Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms) provide a very good platform for us to reach the most remote areas of China.” He signed an agreement to provide Hema with a container. The entire durian. “This is one of the fastest, safest and most stable ways to enter this huge market.”

While cross-border e-commerce is the old hat of Alibaba, the world’s largest online site by volume, the real game-changer that empowers Malaysian businessmen is a program known as the Electronic World Trading Platform.

Three years after Alibaba founder Ma Yun first proposed the concept, eWTP took root in Malaysia, including e-commerce infrastructure, logistics, financial technology to cloud computing and other commercial facilities, and even upgrading, even with the latest technology to completely innovate .