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In recent years, fruit export in Taiwan can be divided into fresh/frozen fruit, fruit juice, fruit preparation, dehydrated or dried fruit, canned fruit, etc. In 2016, the total export value was US$197,096 thousand. Fresh/frozen fruit is accounted for half of the value, followed by juice, fruit, dehydrated or dried fruit, and canned fruit. The top 5 exporting countries are China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore. Regarding the fresh/frozen fruit, the most important issue for fruit suppliers is effective fruit sources in the limit of quantity and time to satisfy customers’ needs. To develop a method that maximizes profit, this study selects a supplier in Taiwan which exports fruits to a wholesaler in main land China market. The contract between the supplier and the wholesaler is under study to learn the relationships between the wholesaler and the supplier in term of the quantities and prices in fruit purchases. The quantities and prices of fruit procurement are often influenced by the climate. To protect the benefits of suppliers and wholesales, the supplier-wholesaler contract under study specifies possible ranges of prices and quantities for a set of various types of fruits. Under the contract, the supplier will purchase fruit from farmers. If the supply from the farmers of a particular set of fruits is insufficient during the procurement process, the supplier may use some other types of fruits to substitute the insufficience to fulfill the contract. The study of supplier-wholesaler contract contains four steps: Firstly, this research interviews the supplier to access it’s relevant data. Secondly, the supplier’s data is analyzed to catch the obligations and limitations of the supplier’s procurement process with the farmers, and to clarify the weekly supply relationship between the supplier and the wholesaler based on the contract. Thirdly, a mathematical model is designed to maximize the supplier’s profit and to represent the correlations among the farmers, the supplier, and the wholesaler based on the contract. Finally, the mathematical model is utilized to understand the actual operation in the supplier-wholesaler contract and to predict the possible results after market changes in the future. The mathematic model has been tested based on actual demand of the supplier-wholesaler contract in the years of 2015 thru 2017. The result has confirmed that all the conditions of the model is reasonable set and is representable to the real situation of the contract. Therefore, the study is able to estimate the supplier’s profit of 2018. All in all, the mathematic model developed in this study is a good estimation tool for the supplier’s profit in the fruit supplier-wholesaler contract. This research provides not only a mathematic model for the fruit supplier-wholesaler contract but tends to provide some interesting information for future study in the fruit supply market.
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