Crowned as “a sea of commodities and a paradise for shoppers”, Yiwu of China boasts an aggregate market floor area of 2.6 million square meters with 53,000 booths and 200,000 persons engaging in business. Yiwu market gathers 320,000 varieties of goods of 1,502 categories from 34 trades (notes: there are 500,000 varieties of goods in the world as released by UN).From 1991, Yiwu market turnover has tanked the first among all the large special markets throughout China for 14 years running. In 2003, the total turnover of commodities city was 24.83 billion yuan, which are 8.4% and 8% increase compared with the previous year respectively. Besides, China Commodities City was the only market awarded the honorary title of “emphasizing quality, keeping faith “by State Bureau of Quality Supervision and State Administration of Inspection and Quarantine as well as the only five-star market in Zhejiang province assessed by Zhejinag Administration for Industry and Commerce of China.

With the ever-increasing economic internationalization of Yiwu market, Yiwu has been a converging place of more that 4,000 distributing centers and general agents of famous enterprises from China and abroad, enterprises and merchants from 40 more countries such as America, Japan, Australia, Korea, etc set up more than 220 foreign business institutions in Yiwu and there are 5,000 –odd permanent foreign businessmen. There are over 800 TEUs of goods exported to more than 188 countries and regions everyday. China Exports to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Occident are prominent, which accounts for no less than 50% of the annual total turnover. Among its exports, products from dominant trades represent over 70% of all trades’ aggregate. More than 60% booths in the market have supplied goods for foreign customers. According to statistics released by People’s Bank of China, more than 6,290 foreign enterprises and businessmen have opened their accounts with banks in Yiwu.

Yiwu 8 industries are excellently leading. With core of the policy to develop, strengthen, centralize, promote and base developments on the tenet of exert market predominance. Yiwu is constructing industrial development situations of small commodity, large industry, small enterprise, and large colonization, while cultivating excellent industries and products such as garment, knitting, ornament, color printing, zipper etc., and forming a regionally characteristic economic area.

This article was researched and produced i-WU