Whether the children are getting fast inline skates, a teddy bear or the latest video game this Christmas, the German toy market will again be swamped with toys from China.
The country has long been the largest producer of toys in the world.
"Two-thirds of the toys on sale in Germany come from China," according to Volker Schmid, the executive director of the German Toy Industry Association.
The export volume will amount to more than 1.4 billion euros (US$1.7 billion) this year, and the trade is profitable for German dealers.
Most exports
"China is our most important exporting country, with 85 percent of production," said Otto Umbach in a recent interview.
He is the executive director of idee+spiel, the largest German toy purchasing association.
"There is a huge variety on offer and often very low prices," he said.
This means that more than 1,000 specialized businesses belonging to the association can attain higher margins than elsewhere.
Umbach regularly visits the large toy and consumer goods trade fairs in Asia and praises his trading partners:
"I am impressed again and again by their unbelievable flexibility and ability to deliver quickly," he said.
Currently, China continues to score high on wage-intensive articles, but because production logistics and the technical level of the factories are constantly improving, Umbach is convinced that China will soon conquer the overall toy spectrum as well.
Volker Schmid, the executive director of the German Toy Industry Association paints a similar picture.
"Up to now, ideas have mostly been developed in the Western consumer countries and then implemented in China. But now the Chinese are trying to develop their own palette of products," he said.
The significance of the Chinese toy sector can be seen at the Nuremberg toy fair, the most important trade gathering the world, where the 240 Chinese exhibitors formed the second-largest contingent after Germany.
That represents a phenomenal advance on 1995, when a mere seven exhibitors came from China.
Hong Kong lags
This means that China has now overtaken Hong Kong, which sent 214 exhibitors, and where there are scarcely any toy production plants left -- the manufacturing is done on the mainland.
The territory still functions as the great trading hub. According to the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) in Frankfurt, during the first six months of the year, Hong Kong exported toys to a value of US$355 million to Germany.
That represents 8.6 percent of all toy exports from Hong Kong.
"After the US and Japan, Germany is thus the third-largest recipient of toys made in Hong Kong," according to Winchell Cheung, the director for Germany at the HKTDC.
In addition, he believes Hong Kong is increasingly portraying itself as the design center for the Chinese toy market.
China is also of increasing significance as a sales market.
According to a recent study, the volume of the Chinese toy market will grow from US$3.2 billion last year to more than US$20 billion by 2010, with the sectors expanding most rapidly being educational toys and electronic games.
To date, Western products have often been unsuited to the Chinese market because of cultural differences, according to the study conducted by Tangull, an international consulting firm.
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