It is 10pm in the world’s largest electronics market, and lines of delivery workers who once hauled computer components and knock-off phones now push carts overflowing with Mac lipsticks, Bioderma cleansers and other foreign beauty brands.
The electronics sellers for which Huaqiangbei is famous have mostly gone home, but the wholesale cosmetics merchants crammed into 1,400 stalls in the sprawling market’s Mingtong mall are to work until 2am to meet booming demand.
“It doesn’t matter what promotions are happening, it’s this busy every night,” a seller surnamed Ying said on a recent weeknight.
Photo: Reuters
Ying opened her cosmetics stall three months ago, part of a sudden makeover at the landmark electronics market in this famously entrepreneurial city.
Huaqiangbei is home to dozens of multistory malls housing about 38,000 businesses that historically sold microchip reels and other components. It is also a matchmaking hub for global companies looking to get things made in nearby factories.
However, rents are rising as its once-unruly markets gentrify, with increasingly upscale malls and 5G “experience centers” now lining its tidied roads, reflecting Shenzhen’s upward mobility from a manufacturing and trading hub to what China sees as the sleek equivalent of Silicon Valley.
Where many of the market’s stalls once sold knock-off Apple and Samsung products, vendors have been squeezed by affordable local brands made by firms such as Xiaomi Corp (小米) and Vivo Communication Technology Co (維沃), as well as stricter Internet protocol laws. For many, the easiest move was to get out of electronics altogether.
“We used to just sell phone parts, but by 2016 some of the markets were 50 percent vacant, so we needed to try something else to survive,” said Mingtong Digital City market general manager Lin Xu (林旭), who has worked in Huaqiangbei for 15 years. “We saw there’s great demand for beauty products, whether it’s teenagers, women, men in their 60s and 70s.”
Chinese consumers have a growing appetite for cosmetics, with sales worth 256.9 billion yuan (US$39.14 billion) from January to October, up an annual 5.9 percent, official data showed.
In the same period, overall retail sales dropped 5.9 percent.
Although Mingtong had hosted a smattering of cosmetics dealers for several years, the business took off this year when border closures halted the flow of traders going to Hong Kong and picking up tax-free goods for resale, several wholesalers said.
“For importers with the right licenses, we can buy in bulk here and sell products at a few cents’ markup each,” said a trader named Scott, declining to give his full name, as he was worried he would get in trouble with security staff for speaking to a journalist.
“It’s a bit of a gray area,” he said, adding that not all sellers declare their imported goods or go through the proper channels.
Some buyers at the market purchase items in small batches to sell on Chinese e-commerce sites such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s (阿里巴巴) Taobao.
“It’s a few at a time, but we’re moving such volumes that there’s a good profit to be made,” Scott said.
Seller Eva Zhou said that all her European cosmetics were genuine, although near the end of their shelf lives.
She worries that as more sellers flock to the market, margins could be squeezed further.
“I think a lot of people have lost their jobs with the virus, and now there’s good money to be had here, but it won’t work if everyone is doing it,” she said.
Poland is betting on a flood of investments and technology transfers from Taiwanese companies to reengineer its US$1 trillion economy. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said yesterday that Poland will no longer be “just an assembly hub” as it pursues further investments from the likes of Foxconn Technology Group (富士康). The firm, whose full name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), last month agreed to build electric vehicles (EVs) in the European Union nation and now could be a partner in a semiconductor venture, he said. The government’s aim is to boost manufacturing and the country’s high-tech chops in an era
Taiwan remained the sixth-largest net creditor nation in the world last year, despite a fall of more than 10 percent in its net international investment position (NIIP) over the year, the central bank said yesterday. The NIIP is the difference between a country’s external financial assets and its external financial liabilities. Taiwan’s external financial assets hit US$3.27 trillion at the end of last year, up US$275.75 billion or 9.2 percent from a year earlier, the central bank said in its annual NIIP report. The growth largely reflected an increase in holdings of overseas marketable securities by residents in Taiwan, as well as a
BAD FAITH LITIGATION? The two companies, owned by a California-based private equity firm, could be seeking licensing fees or a settlement payout with the suit Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) Director-General Liao Cheng-wei (廖承威) said yesterday he suspected that two firms suing contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) for patent infringement are “patent trolls.” A patent troll refers to a company that buys patents not for manufacturing products, but to sue other companies for compensation, accusing them of using its patents. Patent trolls, formally called Non-Practicing Entities or Patent Assertion Entities, were responsible for more than 50 percent of lawsuits in the US last year, costing targeted businesses tens of billions of US dollars a year, according to the US-based LegalCharity Web site. Asked whether
RESTRICTION BREACH: ASML said that it denies ‘unfounded rumors regarding non-compliance with export controls concerning China,’ and enforces controls strictly US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick in a series of recent meetings outlined concerns to Dutch chip-equipment giant ASML Holding NV’s senior leaders that one of its top-of-the-line machines might have made its way into China, in violation of US-led export restrictions. In the meetings, Lutnick expressed concern to ASML executives over the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, people familiar with the talks said. EUV systems are used by firms such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) to manufacture processors for the likes of Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc. ASML has never been allowed to ship them to China because of curbs
RSS