Yunnan coffee is sold in Chongqing by Chongqing-Xinzhou-European Railway.

Baristas make coffee at Chongqing Coffee Exchange Center. (Xinhua News Agency)

Chongqing, which produces only coal and no coffee, relies on the "Chongqing-Singapore-Europe" railway connecting Central Europe to concentrate coffee from Yunnan, Southeast Asia and South Asia locally and then export it to Europe or other provinces on the mainland. Coffee has replaced coal as the new "black gold industry" in Chongqing, and the local energy companies that used to operate the coal industry have also transformed the coffee business.

Xinhua News Agency reported that Chongqing does not produce a single coffee bean, but by the end of the first quarter of this year, the Chongqing Coffee Trading Center, which was established in June last year, has accumulated 5.268 billion yuan (RMB, the same below) in spot coffee transactions, making it the largest electronic coffee trading platform on the mainland.

The initiator of the trading center is Chongqing Energy Group. Feng Yue, chairman of the group, pointed out that the open advantage given by Belt and Road Initiative enables the coffee trading center to take Chongqing as the core. Yunnan, Southeast Asia, South Asia and other major Asian coffee producing regions and European consumer markets are closely connected, becoming an important distribution center for coffee logistics, and forming radiation and agglomeration to the global coffee industry.

From coal to the business of coffee beans, Chongqing Energy Group has taken a fancy to the fact that coffee consumption in the mainland has maintained an average annual rapid growth of more than 20%, and the scale of the coffee consumption market is expected to grow from 100 billion yuan at present to more than 600 billion yuan in 10 years.

However, a more critical condition for Chongqing to become an electronic trading center for coffee on the mainland is the cost of transportation to Europe. It is estimated that it takes only 13 days to transport coffee from Chongqing to Duisburg, Germany, through the Yuxin Europe international train, which is 30 days less than river-sea combined transport, and the cost is 4 / 5 cheaper than air transportation.