Market training let CEO Liu Baolin have enough confidence to meet this new wind mouth
"Every step that follows is critical because it's time to build the market and scale the audience." Liu is also trying to figure out what to do next.
Intelligent sorting has a bright future
At 6 am on November 11, 2020, at the Guangzhou cross-border e-commerce small bag sorting center of China Post, the goods ordered by customers have been piled up in the warehouse.
Past, hundreds of skilled workers to battle together, the need in the express of artificial pick up, but the past security package has been delivered to a before an intelligent sorting system, several staff quickly put for package, the package, large and small package after 0.05 seconds of dynamic weighing and sweep through high speed sorting immediately after the car, On the other side, the control system on the computer side displays the information of the goods currently sorted and saves it in the management system, forming a complete package tracking and traceability system.

Through 72hours machine sorting without stopping,"'Double 11'' Express sorting tasks during peak hours has been successfully accomplished in this center.There was no previous warehouse bursting phenomenon, until this moment the business department manager Yuan's heart was hanging, because just a few months ago, he was very anxious because of the arrival of "Double 11".

“The Guangzhou cross-border e-commerce sorting center only accepts and delivers packages to foreign countries. International express delivery charges are more than 100 yuan per kilogram, so the requirements for the security check, weighing, sorting and delivery of goods are very high. Every year, Singles' Day faces huge challenges.”

When Manager Yuan found Etown, it was only two months before the "Double 11". Liu Baolin advanced the weighing system to the second step in order to solve the difficulty of weighing packages, and adopted dynamic weighing to improve the accuracy of weighing, and the error rate was only 1/1000. At the same time, combining with the area of the sorting center, the width of the sliding chute for the parcel dropping is designed to 67.5 cm from the internationally used 75 cm, which saves space and improves efficiency to the greatest extent. The flexibility and accuracy of the whole scheme are higher than those of other companies negotiated by Guangzhou Post.

As the largest cross-border e-commerce small bag sorting center in China, the Guangzhou cross-border e-commerce sorting center has to sort 180,000 pieces of goods every day, which requires more than 70 people to work at the same time. After using the high-speed sorting system, the daily sorting volume has increased to 300,000 pieces, an increase of 66%, while the staff has decreased to 35 people, a decrease of 50%.

At present, as e-commerce giants represented by Alibaba and Jingdong as well as express delivery enterprises such as SF Express begin to build intelligent warehousing logistics, intelligent sorting system, as an important link in intelligent logistics, will have a broad market prospect brought by its equipment upgrade.

According to the calculation of China Merchants Securities, the intelligent construction and upgrading of transfer centers of SF Express, "Three Tons and One Tat" (YTO, STO, ZTO, Yunda), Deppon and other express delivery companies in the next five years will generate the demand for intelligent sorting equipment worth 50 billion yuan. At the same time, the intelligent logistics sorting system replaces manual labor and automatically completes express sorting, with high sorting efficiency and low error rate, which can bring better user experience. Major e-commerce companies, such as Cainiao, JD.com, Suning and Vipshop, spend about 500 million to 1 billion yuan each on automation equipment each year.

Liu Baolin told reporters that at present, 90% of the domestic enterprises still use artificial sorting, domestic intelligent sorting system market is just starting, the potential is huge.

"Express companies like YTO and STO prioritize price when upgrading their equipment, so they are not our preferred target customers. We prefer high-quality customers like customs and cross-border e-commerce companies, because they care more about the accuracy and accuracy of the sorting system."

The precision and accuracy is the core competitiveness of Etown, after five years of product research and development, Etown has accumulated more than 30 national patents, hardware design produce high-speed intersection, straight line cross, reciprocating cross products, such as sorting system equipment sorting accuracy as high as 99.98%, automatic weighing error rate in one over one thousand, The sorting time of single piece of goods is 0.15 seconds, which is higher than the leading enterprises in the industry. In terms of software, the company has built barcode scanning system based on image analysis, remote monitoring and fault diagnosis system, and package video tracking and traceability system, etc., and supports the docking with enterprise ERP and WMS data, so as to facilitate the use of customers.

In 2015, Etown obtained a financing of 4 million yuan from Hefei Hi-Tech Venture Capital Co., Ltd., namely the angel fund of Hi-Tech Zone. Yu Haoran, the investment manager in charge of this business, told the reporter that the reason for investing in Etown at that time was mainly from the market, the team and the entrepreneurs themselves.

First of all, intelligent manufacturing is the development direction strongly supported by the state. As a key component of intelligent manufacturing, intelligent logistics has a promising market prospect. Secondly, after years of technical research and development, some technical indicators of the sorting system have even surpassed those of foreign enterprises, forming a certain market barrier.

"At that time, the sorting system in China was either one of the businesses of listed companies, or it was just starting small companies in Guangdong and Shenzhen, and almost no one involved in Anhui."
"The founder's willingness to give up years of living abroad and return to China to start his own business proves his determination and perseverance," Yu said.

Graduated from anhui university biological professional Liu Baolin is a love for people, business before he in Canada, the American drug companies working in the office for ten years, when he found that foreign drugs have some automated selected pick up and delivery, while the country is still in the stage of manual operation, so he had to enter goods sorting the idea of industry.

Even if you have to go through 98 difficult things to start a business in a familiar field, you should be prepared to change careers and start a business without finding anything. "I was never focused on making money first and foremost. I just wanted to make the product right."

In 2013, for the first time, Etown designed a swing-arm sorting device for YTO Express. However, since the logistics industry had not established a sound data information management system at that time, the label barcode of each package could not be traced to the source, so it was a lot of inconvenience to use this sorting machine. In the end, the product that Liu Baolin had such high hopes for was ruthlessly "disregarded" by YTO.

Three years of hard work went down the drain and employees left. "At its worst, there were only a few people in the company," he said. Fortunately, there were almost no similar enterprises in Anhui at that time, so Etown successively won the Small and Medium Enterprise Innovation Fund of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Anhui Provincial Scientific Progress Award and Hefei Science and Technology Award and other awards. All kinds of awards saved Etown from the brink.

Cut paths through mountains and build bridges across rivers，In 2015, with the successful research and development of the high-speed cross-belt sorting system and the support of Angel Fund of High-tech Zone, Liu Baolin finally saw the hope.

In 2018, Etown successfully won the project of Cainiao Logistics in Xuchang, Henan. "This logistics center specializes in the distribution of mid and high-end wig products. The package price is high and the quality is light, so we designed the solution to add a photo link when the package is supplied, so that the product can be visualized, controllable and traceable throughout."

Even with the experience of working with industry giants, Liu admits that it is still difficult to expand the market. On the one hand, the industry has long been monopolized by foreign products, most customers do not trust domestic companies, and on the other hand, many start-ups have experienced the problem of lack of money.

In addition, the birth of Amazon Kiva robot has given rise to a boom in the research and development of AGV (sorting robot). As another solution for sorting goods, the emergence of AGV will undoubtedly have a certain impact on companies that do cross-band sorting system.

Liu Baolin is believed the AGV car solution is not yet mature, on the one hand, limited usage scenarios, need to set up double warehouse, on site area and the design requirement is very high, on the other hand, the limited load goods, now mainly small parcel sorting under 5 kg, if a car in a failure will affect the entire sorting route.
In the long term, however, AGV car technology will continue to evolve, and it is not clear whether customers will skip the cross-band sorting system and go straight to AGV cars when design and cost become reasonable.

Liu said:''In the express delivery and e-commerce markets, we are winning with technology and quality, and in those markets that have not yet been tapped, we need to take the lead.”