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Fresh faces from Africa, Latin America, India and Russia are giving a boost to the Yiwu International Commodity Market.
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Ben De, General Manager of Fashion Xing Co. said "Our orders shrank about 30 percent over the same period last year. I am sorry for that. We have to wait for the global economy to recover. Our clients are more cautious than before."
To increase his orders, he has to speed up his turnaround of new products. Currently, about five percent of the products in the market are replaced with new ones each month. Shop owners in Yiwu can sense the change.
One business owner of Yiwu Int'l Commodity Market said "In the past, we had five to six orders a day, or six to seven orders at most. But now, we only have one or two orders a day, sometimes only one order in several days."
It is mostly shoppers from the US, Canada and France that have disappeared from the market. To attract more shoppers, 85 percent of the market's business owners have introduced new products to the market. But the number of American and European shoppers has already declined by almost a third. In contrast, a lot of fresh faces are bringing new business to the market.
One business owner of Yiwu Int'l Commodity Market said "Our new clients are from Africa, Latin America, Chile, Brazil and Iran."
At the end of September, there were nearly 1,900 representative offices from 83 countries and regions in Yiwu, the result of the fastest yearly growth in its history. In the first three quarters, Jinhua customs received 212,000 export customs declarations and 400,000 containers, up 27 percent and 28 percent over the same period last year, respectively. Of that growth, exports to the Middle East, Africa and Latin America increased dramatically, with exports to new emerging markets, including India, Russia and Brazil, doubled year-on-year.
(CCTV November 6, 2008)
