Workers select lychees for export at a company in Gaozhou City, south China's Guangdong Province, June 4, 2025. Chinese lychees are winning over more fans abroad due to the cold-chain technology and air transportation. In the United Arab Emirates, with a 48-hour transportation process from picking to marketing, Chinese lychees boarded the shelves of supermarkets still with fresh fragrance. Every week, four tons of Chinese lychees are transported in two shipments by air from south China's Guangdong to Dubai and sold out in just three days. These lychees, across thousands of miles, have become a fresh and sweet business card for China on the tables of local consumers. (Xinhua/Mao Siqian)

China's cold-chain logistics sector continued to expand in the first half of the year, buoyed by government policies to ramp up domestic consumption, according to the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP) on Monday. 

In the first six months, demand for food-related cold-chain logistics reached 192 million tons, up 4.35 percent year-on-year, while revenues for service providers in the segment totaled 279.94 billion yuan (38.56 billion), a 3.84 percent year-on-year rise, according to a press release the CFLP sent to the Global Times. 

The industry is seeing steady growth in market demand on a larger overall scale, amid ongoing structural adjustments. With fresh produce now entering the annual peak consumption season, the entire food cold-chain segment is demonstrating resilient expansion, the statement read, predicting the demand for cold-chain logistics to further increase in the third quarter.

"The China cold-chain logistics sector has improved rapidly in the past decade. Along with increasing square meters in China, there is more availability, bringing in more companies and enabling more services," Gonzalo Matamala, general manager for Asia and China at Chile-based Giddings Fruit, told the Global Times on Monday.

"Local Chinese companies now offer high-standard service with significant improvements in technology and are expanding their reach from coastal regions to inland provinces, enlarging the scope of cold-chain logistics service," said Matamala, whose company ships thousands of refrigerated containers of cherries from Chile to China each year.

A separate industry report on China's cold-storage market showed that investment in cold-storage projects rose 7.67 percent year-on-year in the first six months to 22.31 billion yuan, driven by government policy stimulus and market demand. Construction, renovation, expansion, and smart upgrading projects are accelerating, pushing overall investment and market volume steadily higher. 

Meanwhile, sales of refrigerated trucks totaled 29,474 units in the first six months, up 18.19 percent year-on-year. New-energy refrigerated truck sales were especially strong, with 10,548 units sold—an increase of 119.61 percent. Their penetration rate reached 35.8 percent at the end of June, up 16.5 percentage points from the same period last year, the CFLP said.

Global Times