Shwin Chang Lone Manufacturing Company Limited (SCL) is a family-owned tea company headquartered in Yangon and its Mother’s Love tea plantation is located at Kho Young Village, Tangyan Township, Northern Shan State. The family’s tea trading business in Tangyan region dates back to 1969, at a time when horses and donkeys were used to transport tea. In 1993, SCL was officially founded by U Than Win and two small green tea factories were built in the Palaung villages of Loi San and Loi Pan respectively. In 2001, SCL began the development of a 50-acre tea plantation in Kho Young Village as part of an opium substitution program initiated by the government and has expanded it to 350 acres by the end of 2021.
Since 2006, SCL has been collecting fresh tea leaves from its own plantation and its surrounding villages to produce a wide variety of high-quality teas marketed as Mother’s Love Tea as its brand name in both domestic and foreign markets. Today, SCL is involved in its entire tea value chain from nursing, planting, picking to processing, packaging, transportation and distribution of finished tea products to wholesale and retail markets both directly to customers and through agents. SCL currently operates
five tea factories, three in its tea plantation, one in Loi San and one in Loi Pan. Annually, SCL manufactures a total of about 450 MT finished tea from its own factories. Through sales of its tea products, SCL has been consistently generating an annual revenue of at least MMK 1 billion since 2017. SCL currently employs a total of about 150 fulltime, permanent employees and during harvesting seasons, it also recruits up to 300 daily-wage laborers (number depends on seasons and daily labor demand) from nearby villages for tea picking and plantation maintenance works.
To fully utilize its factories, SCL is not only picking fresh tea leaves from its own plantation but also buying them from the nearby 40+ villages with 1000+ households, benefiting 10,000+ headcounts in Tangyan region. Among them, about 70% of the local farmers who carry out the tea picking works are women and youths. In fact, 80% the Board of Directors of and Senior Management of SCL are women, making it a rare women-led organization in the region and an empowering example to the local women living in a patriarchal community.