China, A New Market For Colombian Tropical Fruits

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and analyze the feasibility of China as a new business opportunity, or a new market for tropical fruits from Colombia. To define whether, both for Colombia and China, seeing it from the point of view of production, marketing, logistics, among others, it is possible these products especially from this South American country. For example, viewing from the logistics side, there would be no problem, taking into account that some neighboring countries from Colombia such as Peru and Chile are exporting abundant fruits to China.Colombia, as a new developing country, is following the trend that most of developed countries have made, where the share in the agricultural sector in the GDP is declining in favor of sectors such as industry and services, but maintaining a growth rate still important, with a contribution to the economic and social development of Colombia that occupies an important space. Colombia is a country that throughout its history has been purely agricultural; due to the changes that in recent years the world has had, is giving more importance to other sectors as manufacturing, or the exploitation of natural resources as oil, minerals and metals, but still spends a high amount of production resources as labor (direct and indirect) and land for the agricultural sector.Taking as reference the agricultural importance that Colombia has for the world as one of the leading suppliers of tropical fruits for countries such as United States, Netherlands, Sweden and France, among others, but also analyzing the difficult situation that this sector lived due to the financial crisis experienced by the world’s major developed countries in2007when they decided to decrease the level of imports of fruits due to lack of money or due to protection policies for their domestic producers, arises China as the new market opportunity for these products. Due to the important role that China has won in the last years in the global economy, becoming the largest trading partner that all countries want to have because of the growth it has had, but also because of the dynamism that China has shown in its foreign trade, and the necessity of Colombia to diversify its trading partners and leave the dependency in United States and Europe. Colombia sees China as the new market feasible for export its tropical fruits. Some reasons that support this idea is the huge market that China is with more than1350million of people, but also due to the preference that its population has for the taste of citrus and tropical fruits. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the feasibility of this new market for Colombia, analyzing since Colombia’s internal production of fruits, looking which of those fruits would be accepted in the Shanghai market, but also which competitors would have the imported fruits from Colombia, and all the things that are related with the logistics, marketing and the distribution of these in China.