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ApexInfo platform develops meat trading system
ApexInfo CEO Kim Dong-won delivers congratulatory remarks during a presentation on its business-to-business online meat trading system at the Imperial Palace Hotel in Seoul, Friday. / Courtesy of ApexInfo
By Park Jin-hai
By Park Jin-hai
Korean livestock product trade platform developer ApexInfo has started an innovative business-to-business online trading system for meat products.
“The distribution costs always burdened the meat market here, taking almost half the total costs,” said ApexInfo CEO Kim Dong-won on Friday, during a presentation to investors at the Imperial Palace Hotel in Seoul. “Our online meat bidding system, Apex Meat Trading System (MTS), can effectively cut the distribution costs as well as return more margins for each trader.”
The MTS is similar to the stock trading system, where wholesale sellers and buyers can bid using more than 150,000 standardized codes by the kind of meat, origin, brand, grade, storage plant location, packaging methods and date of butchery.
“In traditional e-commerce, suppliers post their product pictures and prices and customers buy them, revealing all the information of both sides,” Kim said. “This is what the wholesalers most complained about. When the parties and purchase prices are made public, they have little room to suggest different prices in future. Providing standardized meat products, under conditions of maximum security, is the essence of our business model.”
Under the MTS system, there is no base price for products and the purchase record of only costs and brands is shared. Also, meat products can be purchased through advanced orders, much like futures trading and profit-taking trades of the stock market, as well as spot trading.
Coupled with a fast-aging and shrinking population, livestock farms are struggling with productivity. And high distribution costs are adding to problems.
Domestic meat market distribution costs account for more than 45 percent of total costs, eroding overall farm profits.
The company says the new system can help the bottom lines of farms by providing more transparency in the meat market and cutting distribution costs.
“This kind of system hasn’t existed in Korea,” Kim said. “Through the anonymous multi-to-multi bidding process, suppliers can sell their products at due prices. With the price data accumulated through the system, sellers and buyers can have a high level of price predictability, lessening the risk of price fluctuation.”
Partnered with Gretech Online Multimedia Player (GOM Player), a media player for Windows, ApexInfo says it plans to adopt various cutting-edge IT technologies, including Internet of Things, for the meat market.