Vitamin C Facts

Vitamin C, also known as L-ascorbic acid, is a water-soluble vitamin. Its structure is similar to glucose, and it is a polyhydroxy compound. It exists in blood and cells in the form of reduced ascorbicacid. As an essential nutrient element of human body, Vitamin C exists widely in biological tissues, fruits and vegetables, plants and animal livers, and plays an important role in metabolism, growth and development of human body.

Vitamin C Production Technology and Price Change History

All in all, Vitamin C is very important to human body. In Europe and America, there was a habit of daily oral Vitamin C as health care for a long time. Today, it's very easy for us to buy more than 100 bottles of Vitamin C in a drugstore for 5 yuan. But decades ago, ordinary Chinese people couldn't easily buy vitamin.

Vitamin C was first extracted from plants, such as oranges. Later, people may find that it assumed to many oranges, so they invented the fermentation method to produce Vitamin C, through microorganisms or enzymes to decompose organic compounds into other compounds. From 1933 when German invented the "reichsch chemical method" to produce Vitamin C to the 1980s, the Vitamin C giants all over the world have been using this method, but this method is relatively complex, with high requirements for process and production equipment, which is a great challenge to the safety control of production line. At that time, there were only three manufacturers in the world who could master the production process of Vitamin C and produce Vitamin C via in applicable production line: Roche in Switzerland, BASF in Germany and Takeda pharmaceutical in Japan. Later, they formed a VC monopoly alliance, controlling the production and price of VC all over the world.

Until the 1980s, the Institute of Microbiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing pharmaceutical factory jointly invented the two-step fermentation method. This method not only requires low raw materials and production technology, but also greatly improves production efficiency, which directly pulls the price of VC to a very low price, like the price of cabbage in Chinese saying.

China Vitamin C Export Current Situation and Price Change

China is one of the major exporting countries of Vitamin C in the world, mainly exporting to developed countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany. According to statistics, more than 90% of vitamin C in the world is produced by several pharmaceutical factories in China. From January to July 2019, the export volume of vitamin C in China reached 100000 tons, an increase of 19.8% over the same period of 2018, including 1.3 tons in July, a year-on-year decrease of 12.6%; from January to July, the export volume of vitamin C reached 399.84 million US dollars, a decrease of 26.8% over the same period of 2018, including 41.998 million US dollars in July, a year-on-year decrease of 45.5%.

From the export price trend of Vitamin C in China, the price of Vitamin C has been affected by the excess capacity of Vitamin Industry in recent years, and the average export price of vitamin C in China continued to be low, basically maintained at about $35000 / ton. With the tightening of national environmental protection policies in China and the contraction of production capacity, the average export price of vitamin C in 2017 rebounded to US $591000 / T. In 2018, affected by the weak market demand, the average export price of vitamin C in China was US $57500 / T, down 2.7% compared with 2017.

Vitamin C Application Industry Prospect

Vitamin C industry has a wide range of downstream application fields, and its downstream application is mainly in pharmaceutical food, feed, cosmetics and other fields, of which pharmaceutical and food are the main application fields, accounting for 95% of the total. Vitamin C has a wide range of physiological functions. In recent years, most studies have shown that the treatment of tumors requires long-term and large doses of vitamin C. In addition, as an antioxidant and coenzyme, Vitamin C plays an important role in anti-aging and promoting the absorption of calcium and iron.

As vitamins have many health care effects, more and more people pay attention to them, and they are widely used in clinical and pharmaceutical fields. From 2012 to 2018, the market scale of Chinese pharmaceutical industry increased from 1708.3 billion yuan to 3377.5 billion yuan. With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and the unremitting pursuit of quality of life, Vitamin C will have a wider application in daily health care and clinical medicine.

Recommended Vitamin C Verified Suppliers in OKCHEM

Hangzhou Minsheng Healthcare CO., LTD.

Anhui BBCA Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd

Hangzhou Dawn Ray Pharmaceutical Co.,Ltd.

SHANGHAI MERRY YANG ENTERPRISE CO.,LTD

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