As soon as Lingnan Hall’s announcement came out, President Zhu of the Yunnan Pu’er Tea Association broke out in a cold sweat.
Because what they counted was indeed this year's new Pu'er tea, but they forgot that Pu'er tea is not more expensive the newer it is, but the older it is, the more expensive it is.
To use the words of capital speculation, Pu'er tea will not depreciate over time. Instead, it will become more fragrant as it ages, just like aged wine.
This is because new Pu'er tea often has a distinct bitter taste.
But after decades of aging, the tannins, tea polyphenols and other substances in the tea gradually oxidize, and the bitter taste almost disappears, replaced by a mellow and soft taste.
The tea soup is as smooth as silk in your mouth, and the sweetness lasts for a long time.
In fact, those who are truly engaged in the Pu'er tea industry know that the concept that Pu'er becomes more fragrant as it ages is a big scam.
Because as the storage time increases, Pu'er tea not only loses its aroma, but also has no taste.
The aroma of some old teas is not as pleasant as the aroma of new teas in recent years. In fact, the longer the tea ages, the worse its taste becomes.
Not to mention the long-term consequences, from a medical point of view, high temperature and high humidity can cause tea leaves to mold and produce the carcinogen aflatoxin. Drinking this kind of tea is equivalent to paying for illness.
However, capital fabricates gimmicks such as "ancestral old tea" and "return of Hong Kong warehouses", and takes advantage of consumers' pursuit of scarcity to label tea that is actually 3-5 years old as 20 years or 50 years old or more, and increase the price by 10 times or even a hundred times.
Like the famous "King" Fu Yuanchang Pu'er tea, this kind of tea produced before the liberation was sold at a sky-high price, and 200 grams of tea could be sold for more than one million yuan.
Is this kind of Pu'er tea still drinkable? This is just a financial game of passing the parcel.
President Zhu was in a dilemma now, because the number of new tea was easy to count, but the number of aged Pu'er was really hard to say, especially since the Pu'er Tea Association was only established in 2006.
Your association has only been established for less than 10 years. How do you know the quantity of Pu'er tea 20 or 30 years ago?
What if the Pu'er tea in Lingnan Hall is this kind of decades-old tea? Would you dare to say that it is fake?
After figuring this out, President Zhu became worried. He looked at everyone in the field while smoking a cigarette:
"Everyone, what should we do next? Lingnan Hall is determined to sell tea. Although their quantity is small, only a little over a thousand tons, they have top-quality Pu'er tea."
At this time, Vice President Wang also looked at the dozens of members, or dozens of Pu'er tea merchants in the conference room.
“According to our preliminary statistics, if what Lingnan Hall said is true and all of it is top-grade Pu’er tea like Mansong Laobanzhang, then the value of more than 1,000 tons of Pu’er is outrageous.
Let me give you an example. In Mansong Prince Mountain, one kilogram of raw tea costs 50,000 yuan now. If it is made into dry tea or refined tea, the price of one kilogram will be over 100,000 yuan.
In addition, the refined flower of Bingdao Laozhai tea is now around 90,000 yuan per kilogram. Even if Laobanzhang is cheaper now, it still costs tens of thousands per kilogram.
Let's divide it by the average. Let's say a kilogram of top-grade Pu'er tea sells for 50,000 yuan. Isn't that a low price? But when you add up over a thousand tons, that's worth 50 to 60 billion yuan.
If they don't rush and sell slowly, and instead hype it up like we do, then it's possible that this much tea could fetch hundreds of billions. I'm asking you, are you afraid? Ah? Are you afraid?
We've painstakingly driven up the price of Pu'er tea over decades. How much can we sell in a year now? How much can we earn? If you were in the market, I'm afraid earning tens of billions a year would be a remarkable achievement.
I'm not bragging, even though I'm Yunshui Pavilion and have become the industry leader, the profit I make from Pu'er tea is still less than 5 billion yuan a year, and there are many shareholders who share the dividends."
As soon as these words were spoken, everyone knew how serious the consequences of Lingnan Hall selling tea were.
This not only breaks their monopoly on Pu'er tea, but also because the Pu'er tea market cake is actually this big. If everyone gets a piece, everyone will have food to eat.
However, Lingnantang's strong involvement in the sales of high-end Pu'er tea is going to cut off a big piece of the cake.
This has made it the "public enemy" of all Pu'er tea merchants.
Vice President Liu Xiaode was so angry that he slammed the table and cursed:
“Guangdong people don’t follow the rules when doing business. Even if you have Pu’er tea and want to sell it, you have to ask us for our opinion to see if we can buy it first.
By selling directly himself, he is disrupting the market and breaking the market stability we have worked so hard to establish. Isn't he afraid that the Pu'er tea market will collapse and his tea will be wasted? "
Everyone in the venue was talking about it, and their faces looked as ugly as if their parents had died.
Chairman Zhu knocked on the table, signaling everyone to be quiet:
"Okay, let's talk about it, how should we respond?
The Lingnan Hall has been hiding in Huadu and has never opened branches outside the city. Even if we want to cause trouble for them, there is no way.
I contacted an old friend in the relevant department of Huadu, hoping to put some pressure on Lingnan Hall. But he told me that Lingnan Hall is a major taxpayer in Huadu and even in Dongguang Province, and that they can't be easily touched.
Our only option is to defeat them commercially, but how? Let's discuss this.
Lingnan Hall is holding a Pu'er tea ordering fair in a few days. If they really win the bid, we will not only lose face, but also make all our money."
The reason why the people in the Pu'er Tea Association are so anxious and afraid of competition is actually their own fault.
In order to monopolize the high-end Pu'er tea market, we must firmly grasp one point: "Scarcity makes things valuable."
Therefore, the supply of high-end Pu'er tea has always adopted hunger marketing, with small quantities released each time, resulting in a situation where "tea is hard to come by" in the market.
The consumer’s mentality is that the more you can’t buy something, the more they think it is a good thing and the more they want to buy it.
When supply and demand are unstable and demand exceeds supply, prices will also rise, and they will rise year by year.
Then when it comes to me, I feel embarrassed.
If they supply in large quantities or engage in a price war with Lingnantang, the high-end Pu'er tea market will surely collapse once it loses its mystery and scarcity.
But if they allow Lingnantang to sell high-end Pu'er tea, who will the Yunnan people sell their Pu'er tea to?
After all, the Pu'er tea market is just a niche market, and the market is so small. If someone cuts off a large piece of cake, the rest will be a mess.
What to do? This is a big problem facing all tea merchants.
At this time, a member stood up, and Niu Jianyu said:
"Everyone, we can't talk now. We could have sat down with Lingnan Hall and taken all the tea leaves they had. But Vice President Wang just said it would cost at least 50 to 60 billion.
I can't afford so much money anyway.
Even if everyone divides the money and each person takes 1 billion or 2 billion, who among you can come up with that much money? Lao Zeng, do you have it? Lao Li, you have a lot of money, can you come up with billions in cash at once?
Everyone in the venue hurriedly shook their heads, and many people were thinking that even if they could afford it, they would not pay.
People are not united, which has always been a tradition in China. Our people are good at internal fighting but not good at external wars.
As the old saying goes, one Chinese person is a dragon, and a group of Chinese people are a group of insects.
Seeing that everyone agreed with his opinion, Niu Jianyu continued:
"Since verbal battles don't work, we can only resort to physical battles. We have no way to stop Lingnan Hall from selling tea, and it's too late to sue, so we can only fight each other.
We need to leverage the strengths of our Pu'er Tea Association. Didn't Lingnan Hall accuse us of bullying in their announcement? Well, let's show them how bullying works.
You said you are Mansong? Bullshit!
You said you were from Iceland? Nonsense!
You say you are the Phoenix Nest? The rice field? Tianmen Mountain? Stop kidding.
Let's go over there. Didn't Lingnan Hall advertise a tasting event? They even generously said all-inclusive accommodations. So, let's go in the name of the Pu'er Tea Association!
But no matter what kind of Pu'er tea they bring out, we deny it outright, saying it's all fake tea, inferior tea passed off as good quality. We give them a complete denial.
What are we? We are the Pu'er Tea Association, an authoritative organization.
Regarding Pu'er tea, do we professionals understand it, or does he, a Cantonese guy selling ginseng and cordyceps, understand it? Who do the Chinese people and the media trust more?
Someone in the meeting hall exclaimed: "Calling a deer a horse?" (End of this chapter)
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