Stevioside is the health sweetener with natural sweetness and low calorie as well as the medical auxiliary therapeutic agent extracted from stevia rebaudiana of asteraceae herbs, whose sweetness is 200-300 times that of sucrose while calorie is just 1/300 of that of sucrose. It is proved by numerous drug experiments that stevioside is of high safety without toxicity, side effects or carcinogen. Hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, dental caries and other diseases can be prevented by regularly eating stevioside, which is the ideal sweetener that can be a substitute for sucrose.

Stevioside can be widely used in food, beverage, medicine, wine making, cosmetics, household chemical industry and other industries, and save 50%-60% of the cost compared with sucrose.

In addition, data show that stevioside contains 14 kinds of amino acid and 10 kinds of microelements, namely, Fe, Zn, Cu, Co, Mn, Mo, sulfur, F, Cr and Br, the element adjusting balance. Soluble in water and alcohol, stevioside belongs to non-fermentable substance with stable property. Difficult to turn mouldy, stevioside with unique refreshing sweetness can be a substitute for sucrose to be used in food, candy, medicine, cosmetics, cigarette, etc.

At the end of 2008, the approval of the U.S. FDA raised a tide of stevioside as natural sweetener around the world. Currently, stevioside is the first choice as sweetener addictive used in various food producing fields in the U.S. market. China's stevia rebaudiana extract market is in a stable stage now. Different from other natural raw material extract markets, stevia rebaudiana enjoys the strength of self-cultivation whose market is relatively stable compared with those of other plant extracts.

In 2000, China's export value of stevia rebaudiana extracts was less than USD 1 million. After the rapid growth in export in 2006, China's export value of stevia rebaudiana reached USD 84.30 million in 2009, increasing by 132% YOY, while its export volume was about 3,350 tons, increasing by 14.40% YOY.

As one of the countries firstly involved in the stevia rebaudiana extract industry, China's stevia rebaudiana extract output once accounted for 80% of the global supply volume. In 2009, China's stevia rebaudiana extract output was about 4,000 tons, over 80% of which are for export. However, China is still a major supplier of low-end stevia rebaudiana extracts. It is easily found that the export of the enterprises in China's major stevia rebaudiana producing regions including Shandong, Jiangsu and Tianjin still mainly depends on stevioside with low RA content and even ordinary sugar, while the export volume of high-content stevioside RA 95 and RA 97 in these enterprises is few.

The major export markets for China's stevia rebaudiana extracts include Malaysia, Mexico, the U.S.A., Japan and Hong Kong, China. In recent years, Malaysia becomes the major export market for China's stevia rebaudiana extracts with over half of the export shares. However, Malaysia is not the ultimate consumer market of stevia rebaudiana extracts, but a transit base. The major import company is PureCircle, the branch of an American company in Malaysia, which mainly imports stevia rebaudiana extracts from China and then sells them to other regions in the world.

Due to strong demand for stevia rebaudiana extracts in the world market and approval of stevia rebaudiana extracts in various countries and regions, it is predicted that China's export volume of stevia rebaudiana extracts will continue increasing rapidly in the next few years.

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