CICRA Solutions Colombo Tea e-auction platform marks first year with Rs.175bn sales
Completing Rs.175 billion worth tea sold during 50 weekly sales, CICRA Solutions (Pvt.) Ltd’s awardwinning Colombo Tea e-auction platform is celebrating its first year of operations.
Ceylon Tea regulator Sri Lanka Tea Board’s data shows that the Colombo Tea e-auction has facilitated sale of 276 million kilograms of tea during its first year of operations; the sales through the tea e-auction has also facilitated more than US $ 1.2 billion export revenue through value addition (nearly Rs.225 billion).
“The Colombo Tea e-auction platform is used by all eight tea brokering companies in Sri Lanka and over 300 tea buyers and exporters; it has five concurrent virtual auction rooms. Users of the e-auction have access to power analytics and digital dashboards,” CICRA Holdings Group Director/ CEO Boshan Dayaratne said.
“Colombo Tea Auction is one of
the complex and highly regulated auctions in the world. We managed to incorporate almost all of these features into the Colombo Tea e-auction platform,” Dayaratne said.
“Our latest version of the e-auction platform is now ready with the e-catalogue and the convenor portal to manage and monitoring brokers’ cataloguing process. It also has the built-in optional auto bidding and pre-bidding feature, voice command, chat rooms, API platform for realtime secured data integration with industry stakeholders like the Sri Lanka Tea Board,” Dayaratne said.
“The new version has the facility to enable live viewing access to factory owners,” Dayaratne said, adding that they are now developing the platform to improve the traceability of tea using block chain technology.
The Colombo Tea e-auction platform went live on April 4, 2020, following the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the lockdown, 137-year-old Colombo Tea Auction – world’s oldest single origin tea auction to go live – had been operating a face-to-face manual outcry auction. The manual auction was held for two days per week.
“When we launched the e-auction platform, the first auction took five days, as the users have to be trained, so they could adopt the technology. With the users being trained on several occasions, today’s e-auction is held for two days per week. Our expectation is to reduce the auction time to one day per week. We believe this could be achieved soon,” Dayaratne said.
“As at present, the digital e-auction sells 3.5 lots per minute. Our target is to achieve five lots per minute to reduce the auction to one day. We have already done the necessary changes to the platform with the support of the stakeholders to achieve this.”
“We must thank technical evaluation committee appointed by the Colombo Tea Traders Association (CTTA) headed by Huzefa I. Akbarally for their insights and guidance to convert the e-auction platform from a minimum viable solution to a fullyfledged solution,” Dayaratne said.
“Special note of thanks should be extended to the officials of the Sri Lanka Tea Board, CTTA, Ceylon Brokers Association, Tea Exporters Association, Regional Plantation Companies, Tea Smallholders Associations and Microsoft team in Sri Lanka for invaluable support extended to us to make the Colombo Tea e-auction a reality,” Dayaratne said.
“Our entire team accepted the challenge, purely based on supporting the tea industry at the crisis time, due to the COVID19 lockdown. The entire team worked tirelessly – almost 20 hours a day – to ensure that tea factories get their price for their production and in return are able to pay salaries and bonuses to estate employees before the traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year,” Dayaratne said.
“Our sincere efforts helped our country to generate US $ 1.2 billion foreign exchange revenue despite the pandemic and the tea industry to thrive,” he said.