If you ask where the best hairy crabs come from, you’ll get a wide variety of answers from all over the country.

But if you ask which region’s hairy crabs are the most famous, there’s only one answer.

As you might have guessed, it’s the Yangcheng Lake hairy crab.

Their fame not only overshadows that of hairy crabs from other parts of Suzhou but has even spread across the country and around the world. Embracing a brand-driven approach has been one of Suzhou’s successful strategies for developing its distinctive agricultural industries.

Even with a trump card in a market worth hundreds of billions, Yangcheng Lake still faces its own challenges.

Some feast on meat, while others scrape by

Despite being part of the same industrial chain, some are feasting on the meat while others are left with nothing but dirt.

The solar power sector has grown accustomed to this, while the new energy vehicle industry is struggling.

Meanwhile, the hairy crab industry, which commands a market worth hundreds of billions, is also facing challenges.

Hairy crabs are bought from farmers at depressed prices, then pass through five or six wholesalers who mark them up multiple times, before being sold at premium prices through packaging and marketing.

Crab farmers exclaim, “It’s both exhausting and frustrating.”

The exhaustion stems from the fact that hairy crabs require eight to nine months of cultivation, during which farmers must constantly guard against the impact of adverse weather on yield and quality; the frustration comes from the fact that after a year of hard work, they still face price pressure from wholesalers at the point of sale.

Since most crab farmers operate in isolation and engage in scattered farming, they suffer from a severe lack of information, leading to disorderly production without understanding market demand. At the same time, excessive competition among farmers means that bargaining power inevitably falls passively into the hands of downstream players.

Pricing power is the essence of profit distribution within the industry chain, and whoever controls the information controls the pricing power.

To break down information barriers and promote deep integration between supply and demand, Yangcheng Lake encourages enterprises and individuals to organize specialized cooperatives that place unified orders with crab farmers for demand-driven production. At the same time, the initiative provides professional training to crab farmers to improve production efficiency and quality. Ensuring high-quality products command fair prices and stabilizing the industrial chain are prerequisites for the industry’s development.

However, Yangcheng Lake faces another urgent challenge that needs to be addressed.

Lack of industry leaders and insufficient coordination

Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs have become a sensation, yet no leading enterprise has emerged. Why is this?

As the influence of Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs has expanded, local enterprises have inevitably settled into a comfort zone, gradually neglecting their own brand development and ultimately falling into the trap of having “a product category but no brand.”

“Spending heavily on advertising benefits the entire industry; even if a product is top-notch, major clients will still opt for lower-priced options,” said a representative from a related company.

It doesn’t matter which company’s hairy crabs are of higher quality—as long as they’re “Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs,” that’s all that matters.

This has led to the chaotic phenomenon of “bathed crabs” and “cosmetically enhanced crabs” in the market.

Without a leading enterprise to set the standard, businesses of all sizes—varying in quality—have sprung up everywhere.

Cooperation among companies is lacking, and the prevailing trend is that bad money drives out good. Genuine Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs are expensive to farm, and high-quality crabs command high prices, making them uncompetitive on e-commerce platforms and forcing them to rely on offline channels for sales.

This is why, according to the data, the revenue of several larger listed companies is not as strong as expected, and they have been unable to emerge as unicorns in the hairy crab industry.

Quality is the foundation that sustains a brand’s longevity.

How to strengthen and optimize leading enterprises to spearhead the integration and optimization of the entire hairy crab industry chain is the challenge Yangcheng Lake must overcome next.

Having discussed hairy crabs at length, is Yangcheng Lake really only about hairy crabs? Certainly not.

To implement a high-quality development strategy, Yangcheng Lake has leveraged its “crab culture” to develop related industries such as cultural tourism and the restaurant sector; relying on its rich ecological resources, it has also fostered emerging industries like new energy and electronic information.

Why hasn’t the Yangcheng Lake hairy crab industry leveraged food processing to achieve industrial upgrading?

Due to factors such as the perishable nature of crab meat, its difficulty in storage, a relatively narrow target audience, and the lack of a relevant industrial foundation, Yangcheng Lake did not prioritize this as a development direction; consequently, there are virtually no large-scale deep-processing enterprises for hairy crabs in the region.

Industrial development follows certain principles and patterns. By leveraging its brand influence to develop related industries and combining its resource advantages with transformation and upgrading, Yangcheng Lake has blazed a new trail for development.