Yiwu City: the largest mart for petty commodities

Yiwu City: the largest mart for petty commodities

“Yiwu, 300 kilometers away from Shanghai, is the largest market of petty commodity wholesales in the world where various foreign buyers go to place orders.” Such a depiction comes from Chinese Figures Astonishing the World, a special report co-delivered by the United Nations, the World Bank and Morgan Stanley. In that special report, Yiwu is the only enlisted county economy. And in the choice of “the 2004 Most Favorite Chinese Cities of Domestic and Foreign Public in 2004”, Yiwu ranked the first among all county-level cities.

What’s the reason that a county-level city located in the middle of Zhejiang Province has attracted so much attention of the public? It is a “world supermarket”. 3,000 booths, 10 major exhibition halls, an exhibition area of 70,000 square meters, 1,700 participating enterprises from more than 20 foreign countries and 25 domestic provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, 12,000 overseas merchants from 120 countries and regions?? Such are the records created by the 2005 Yiwu International Commodities Fair (hereinafter abbreviated as Yiwu Fair).

Bo Xilai, China’s Minister of Commerce, claimed after his investigation in Yiwu that to study China’s market economy, it is a must to come to Yiwu; to study the development of China’s non-governmental economy, one must go to Yiwu.

At present, there live 1.6 million people in Yiwu city; but over a million people engaged in construction and business from outside live there year in and year out. Within this small city covering only 1,105 square kilometers, there are 6,000 permanent foreign merchants from more than 100 countries and regions in the world going there to stock commodities and 566 representative offices of overseas companies approved to be established there in Yiwu.

Usually, an army of over 200,000 purchasers send out commodities to 212 countries and regions at an average scale of more than 1,000 international standard containers there each day. In 2005, the trade volume of Yiwu exceeded US$20 billion with its container exports breaking through 400,000 each day.

Without an advantaged geographical location as well as abundant products, Yiwu’s comprehensive development level ranked the 17th among the top 100 counties and cities and its urban competitiveness ranked the top among all county-level cities in Zhejiang in 2004. Its per capita GDP achieved US$5,000, its fiscal revenues RMB2.95 billion, and the per capita net incomes of rural residents there RMB6,969. More surprisingly, the possession volume of cars is 26 per hundred households.

Yiwu has developed its unique advantages. The over 100,000 dealers and 200,000 coming-and-going merchants in the market of petty commodities have constituted a huge selling group.