The recently concluded ‘Green FTP - Shining Dongfang Rosewood 2025 Dongfang Yellow Rosewood Industry Promotion Conference’ has attracted widespread attention again this year. Many leading domestic yellow rosewood companies attended the conference in Hainan, gaining valuable insights into the development foundation, institutional innovation, business environment, and investment opportunities of the Dongfang yellow rosewood industry.

The heartwood of Hainan Yellow Rosewood, known as ‘forest gold’, contains many treasures - precious timber, natural fragrance, and valuable traditional Chinese medicine ingredients are all within. Dongfang City, in southern Hainan Province, is known as the ‘Hometown of Rosewood’. With the start of special customs operations in the Hainan Free Trade Port, why does the yellow rosewood industry of Dongfang have even greater confidence in the future? How can promotional events like this one improve the quality and efficiency of industry development?

Institutional Innovation

Property Certificates Issued for Yellow Rosewood Trees

Yellow rosewood comes in a beautiful variety of colors and wood-grain patterns, and the unparalleled cultural and collectible value makes each piece a highly sought after commodity. Hainan Yellow Rosewood, however, is known for being ‘easy to grow but hard to mature’. For a long time, the industry has lacked standardized value assessment criteria and trading markets, leading to difficulties in transactions, poor liquidity, heavy financial pressure on rosewood growers, and difficulty for growers in reaping significant economic benefits.

At the event, the ‘One Tree, One Certificate, One Code’ model of the Dongfang yellow rosewood industry attracted the attention of many investment companies. According to Peng Jian, Party Secretary and Director of the Dongfang City Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning, this model assigns a unique ‘digital ID’ to each yellow rosewood tree, holding the tree's property rights information, geographical coordinates, growth data, and more - thus achieving single-tree ownership confirmation, unique identity, and full traceability. That means that each yellow rosewood tree is no longer a difficult to quantify natural resource but rather a piece of tangible property that can be clearly defined and legally owned. Each tree is issued a legally valid ‘property ownership certificate.’ This effectively solves problems such as long investment cycles, slow cost recovery, difficulty in confirming and transferring ownership, and poor market circulation. Dongfang also provided policy support for the model by issuing the nation's first regulations for the property registration of single trees through institutional innovation.

An official precious timber trading platform has now been set up by the Dongfang City Government and the Geely Technology Group based on this innovation. Through secure and efficient integration with the government's property registration system, the platform has achieved a closed loop for online transactions and property registration, and has successfully processed thousands of single-tree property ownership certificates to date.

“This institutional innovation provides a solid foundation for the development of the industry, it’s highly dynamic,” said You Zejin, chairman of Sanya Youlong Agricultural Development Company, who attended the event.

Industry Integration

Industrial Chain Development Potential

Currently, Dongfang’s reputation as the ‘Hometown of Rosewood” is growing. The area has established a sizeable yellow rosewood agricultural base, with about 9.2 million trees growing on around 66.6 km2 of land. Five Hainan Yellow Rosewood agriculture demonstration towns and 76 demonstration villages have also been recognized, continuing to strengthen the foundation for industry development.

Thanks to the area’s primary industry, a number of scenic areas, including Hainan Rosewood Valley, have achieved wide-ranging, integrated development. Wang Yongtao, Chairman of the Hainan Rosewood Valley Cultural Tourism Area, explained that the company, with yellow rosewood as its central concept, has created an industrial structure combining cultural heritage, tourism, health and wellness, and educational research. In Nov., 2022, the attraction gained national 4A Scenic Area status, receiving more than 600,000 visitors from across China annually. “We hope that the Dongfang Yellow Rosewood industry will be noticed by more people, and that more people will participate, said Wang.

Zhao Xiaobao, chief representative of Geely Technology Group's Hainan representative office and general manager of Dongfang Yilin, explained that the company will deeply integrate the resources of the Hainan Coastal Scenic Highway and the Tropical Rainforest Scenic Highway. By designing a ‘Yellow Rosewood Culture’ themed route and introducing business formats such as low-altitude flights, forest health care, and Li cultural experiences, the company aims to allow travelers to "connect with a city because of a tree."

Dongfang has also made use of scenic areas to improve rural infrastructure, encouraging farmers to grow yellow rosewood and participate in tourism services through the ‘scenic area + farm’ model. Many area attractions now employ local village residents, enabling farmers to find additional employment close by home and to increase their incomes.

FTP Policy Benefits

New Opportunities for the Dongfang Yellow Rosewood Industry

Businesses are excited to find that Dongfang plans to take full advantage of policy advantages in the context of the Hainan Free Trade Port to promote the comprehensive improvement of the yellow rosewood industry with the ‘One Tree, One Certificate’ model at the core.

Wang Fei, Vice Mayor of Dongfang People's Government, said that in the future, Dongfang will rely on the new digital trading platform and take advantage of the institutional exploration of the Hainan FTP in areas such as financial opening and cross-border data flow to actively promote the transformation of single-tree yellow rosewood property ownership certification from a local green asset to a standardized digital asset with international recognition, attracting capital investment from around the world. Secondly, by leveraging the trade facilitation measures and exhibition platforms of the FTP, standardized and traceable yellow rosewood resources covered by the ‘One Tree, One Certificate’ policy can connect with a wider market, attract external investors and partners, and extend the development of the forest economy, deep processing industry, and cultural tourism, so that excellent policies can be accurately implemented in all aspects of the industrial chain, thereby improving the quality and efficiency of the industry.

Dongfang had a focused investment target at the promotional event - companies that fit into key areas such as industrial chain improvement, industrial integration and innovation, and digital financial empowerment, and that are able to promote high-quality industrial development in the area.

Due to the rapid development of the industry, Dongfang has set up special policies for cultural tourism integration and ecological value transformation in accordance with the needs of industrial development, laying a solid foundation for the future of the Dongfang Yellow Rosewood industry.