A field survey, an emergency procurement, and a targeted assistance plan — ZTO has taken concrete actions to help specialty fruits from ethnic regions leave the deep mountains.

Autumn colors Danba, and the fragrance of apples fills the air. On September 28, the ZTO Sichuan Management Center received a thank-you letter from the Danba County People's Government of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, expressing sincere gratitude for ZTO's help in getting "Meiren Cui" apples out of the mountains and alleviating fruit farmers' sales difficulties — "Sichuan ZTO has fulfilled its corporate social responsibility through practical actions and supported the development of ethnic regions with genuine sincerity. The people of Danba will always remember this deep friendship."

Danba County is located in the high-mountain and canyon terrain of western Sichuan, where abundant sunlight and water sources nurture "Meiren Cui" apples with a crisp, sweet taste and excellent quality. The county's apple planting bases cover more than 8,000 mu, with an estimated output of 1.6 million kilograms in 2026. A bumper harvest is normally good news, but the high-mountain geographical conditions have become an obstacle to selling the fruit outside the region. In Badi Town, one of the main production areas, the orchards sit high in the mountains, and the roads up the mountain are winding, narrow, and one-way. After picking, apples are first transferred from the mountaintop to the county seat, and then transported to Chengdu, which takes 10 hours. For a box of 4 kilograms of apples, the shipping cost alone exceeds 20 yuan. High logistics costs and blocked sales channels have trapped high-quality fruit in the mountains.

With coordination from the Sichuan Provincial Postal Administration, the ZTO Sichuan Management Center responded quickly and sent dedicated staff to Danba County for an on-site survey — the team walked along the winding mountain roads into the fields, visited fruit farmer professional cooperatives, inspected the apple growing environment and fruit quality on site, and learned in detail about planting scale and production and sales pain points, offering diagnosis and suggestions for the local apple industry's development.

After learning about the farmers' urgent difficulties, Sichuan ZTO immediately purchased 2,000 kilograms of "Meiren Cui" apples as employee benefits, using consumption-based assistance to absorb part of the unsold fruit on the spot and ease farmers' short-term sales pressure. This assistance did not stop at a one-time purchase for relief. Sichuan ZTO tailored an assistance plan, relying on its express network resources and platform advantages to open external sales channels for Danba agricultural products. At the same time, Sichuan ZTO continued to deepen party-building co-construction with Mulan Village in Badi Town, working with local merchants and fruit farmers to explore a new "online plus offline" smart sales model, maximizing the role of party-building co-construction in increasing farmers' income and helping them become better off. "Sichuan ZTO will continue to play the role of a bridge and link in the express delivery industry, transform logistics advantages into agricultural assistance advantages, and help specialty agricultural products in western Sichuan leave the mountains," said Zhu Jianing, Party Committee Secretary of the ZTO Sichuan Management Center.