Yiwu: world's largest market of small commodities
Author: dingdu
Source: Chinanews.cn
Date: 2006-12-21,8:13
"Yiwu, 300 kilometers away from Shanghai, is the largest wholesale market of small commodities in the world." Such a depiction comes from a special report jointly published by the United Nations and the World Bank. In that special report, Yiwu is the only county-level economy in China.
An exquisite small pottery pendant sells for 0.9 yuan, while a small unique mirror is priced at 1.5 yuan. Though the Yiwu small commodities market only sells small commodities, it is just these odds and ends that support a huge industry cluster. The price of many commodities here is influencing the price in the global market.
Why has a small county-level city attracted so much attention of the public? Because it is a "world supermarket" built with 420,000 varieties of small commodities and an annual transaction volume of nearly 40 billion yuan (US$5 billion). It is striding forward from a poor small county located in the middle of Zhejiang Province to an international business and trade city.
Zong Yuan, a merchant from Yiwu, got a 30,000 RMB loan from the bank in 1998 and purchased new equipment to manufacture stripped pencils. That July, an Indonesian businessman took a fancy to his pencils and ordered 660 boxes right off, thus Zong made a profit of more than 10,000 yuan in three months. "That was my first export business, from which I truly recognized that small commodities could generate large profits. From then on, I have been to many exhibitions around China and focused on export business." At present, Zong''s factory manufactures 200 million pencils every year, which are exported to over 20 countries and regions in the world, with the profit reaching several million yuan.
Yiwu merchants, a unique colony, dare to think and create, honor their words and are ready to bear hardships. Therefore, some people said, "Each Yiwu businessman is a textbook on market economy."