China ESG Forum Innovation Annual Conference 2023, organized by China Enterprise Reform and Development Society, China Social Responsibility 100 Forum and China Media Group, was held in Beijing on October 22. The conference released the Annual ESG Best Practice Report, in which the case “Breaking through the last mile of rural revitalization: China Post’s model of leveraging its four flows to address the three difficulties”, submitted by China Post Group Corporation Limited, was selected as one of the 30 ESG best practices in 2023 out of 570 cases submitted nationwide.

ESG refers to Environmental, Social and Governance, which is used to measure the sustainability of an enterprise. In recent years, ESG has been increasingly accepted across the world as important criteria to guide investment, assessment and corporate action. The core values of economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, and social equity advocated by ESG are highly consistent with China’s key strategic goals such as high-quality development, rural revitalization, common prosperity, and carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. As a China-based platform with a global outlook for communication, cooperation and improvement of ESG efforts, China ESG Forum aims to focus on sustainable development, push forward the construction of an ESG ecosystem and promote enterprises to better fulfill their social responsibilities.

China Post has always been promoting its corporate sustainability in accordance with ESG criteria, and actively implementing the national strategies. It gives full play to its innate edges to support rural revitalization, addressing farmers’ difficulties in sales, logistics, and financing with its integrated flow of commodity, logistics, capital and information. It has developed a collaborative service system with postal characteristics for benefiting farmers, and facilitated small businesses in rural areas to integrate into the economic flows and agricultural products of rural households to enter the national markets, hence bringing profits to farmers, benefits to consumers, customers to China Post and popular recognition to the government.

To address sales difficulties, China Post, leveraging its ule.com platform online, and 54,000 postal outlets plus 420,000 ULE Ecommerce stations offline, helped build bases, assisted in operations and expanded sales channels. It has completed 1,000 farm produce bases, and then promoted the produce to communities, enterprises, online marketplaces and social channels, thus establishing an integrated O2O supply-demand matching system. From 2018 to the end of September 2023, the upstream commodity flow of selling farm produce to cities came to 39.94 billion yuan (about 5.45 billion US dollars), with an average annual growth rate of 44.1 percent, and the downstream commodity flow of selling industrial products to countries amounted to 60.7 billion yuan (about 8.28 billion US dollars), with an average annual growth rate of 16.1 percent. To tackle logistics difficulties, China Post vigorously advanced the construction of the rural delivery and logistics system with smooth channels transporting industrial products to rural areas and farm produce to cities. It pushed forward the project of transporting mail items by buses and the cooperation between postal enterprises and express companies to facilitate express delivery service in rural areas, thereby enhancing the service capacity of the first mile of farm produce and the last mile of industrial products. China Post also established corresponding delivery solutions to each and every one of the major agricultural products nationwide, and launched two exclusive delivery products, EMS fresh delivery service and postage-off produce boxes (Packing boxes exclusively designed by China Post for farm produce items, with which the authorized farmers can enjoy postage discounts in mailing their produce.). To overcome financing difficulties, China Post made great efforts to advance the construction of rural credit system and promote the exclusive financing E loan package. With its balance of agriculture-related loans exceeding 2 trillion yuan (about 272.6 billion US dollars), PSBC has become a large commercial bank with the largest number of rural outlets, the smallest average single loans, and the highest proportion of rural borrowers.