Plant extract development in China
Plant extract refers to the product formed by directional acquisition and concentration of one or more active components in plants without changing the structure of active components through physical and chemical extraction and separation processes with appropriate solvents or methods. Plant extract is an important intermediate product, has been widely used in food and beverage, condiment, medicine, health products, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, feed additives and other industries.
According to the “2021 China Plant Extract Industry Analysis Report – Industry scale and development planning Trend” . At present, there are more than 300 kinds of industrial extraction, which can be divided into Phytochemicals, Standardized Extracts and Ratio Extracts according to with the content of active components Acids, Polyphenols, Polysaccharides, Flavonoids, Alkaloids, etc.
2. Export scale analysis of Chinese plant extraction industry
With the advantages of rich plant resources, China’s plant extraction industry began to start in the 1990s, and more and more Chinese enterprises began to export plant extracts to European and American countries.
With the improvement of human living standards, the concept of returning to nature has been strengthened. Food, medicine, health products and cosmetics are increasingly green, natural and pollution-free products. Plant extracts have a huge development space and market prospects at home and abroad. According to the analysis of foreign authorities, the global plant extract market is expected to reach 59.4 billion dollars by 2025. As an important exporter of plant extracts, China has still achieved good growth rates during the pandemic, especially in the US market.
In the downstream industry demand, the pharmaceutical industry demand accounts for the largest proportion, followed by food, cosmetics industry. In 2018, 45.23%/25%/22.63%/7.14% of Chinese plant extracts were used in medicine/food/cosmetics/other products, respectively.
According to the statistics of Chinese Customs, the export volume of plant extracts reached 2.372 billion US dollars in 2019, with the compound annual growth rate of 13.35% from 2010 to 2019. In 2020, the total export volume of plant extracts was 2.45 billion US dollars, up 3.6% year on year, and the export volume was 96,000 tons, up 11.0% year on year.
The data released by the research report network show. In 2020, China’s export of plant extracts to the North American market increased by 36.8% in value and 49.7% in volume. The amount of plant extracts exported to the United States in 2020 was 610 million US dollars, up 35.8% year on year, and the volume of exports was 24,000 tons, up 48.8% year on year. The United States remains the largest export market for plant extracts, followed by Japan and Indonesia, accounting for 13.91%, 8.56% and 5.40% of total exports in 2019, respectively.
3. Industry status analysis
As a subdivision of the health industry, plant extract industry is still an emerging industry in the growing stage. At present, Chinese plant extraction industry has a high degree of marketization, and there are many enterprises within the industry, but the scale is different, and the industrial concentration is generally low. There are many varieties of plant extracts, and more than 300 varieties have entered the industrial extraction. The market scale of a single variety is about 10 million to several billion yuan. Due to the small market size of a single variety, there are few enterprises with comprehensive strength in the market of each single product. The leading enterprises can rapidly increase their market share by virtue of the advantages of scale, technology, management and so on, and more and more single products gradually enter the market pattern of monopoly competition or oligopoly.
At present, there are more than 2000 enterprises engaged in plant extraction industry in China, most of which have small scale, low technology and management level, few varieties of production and sales, and low industry concentration. Perfect as the industry regulation, plant extracts, standard specification, and consumers on the improvement of quality requirements, and plant extract industry gradually from low threshold of disorderly competition, enter rely on quality, technology driven benign development stage, the good brand reputation, technology innovation ability, capital strength of the leading enterprises in the competition, continuously improve the market share, To lead the healthy and sustainable development of the industry.