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.
SEEKING CLARITY: Washington should not adopt measures that create uncertainties for ‘existing semiconductor investments,’ TSMC said referring to its US$165 billion in the US Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) told the US that any future tariffs on Taiwanese semiconductors could reduce demand for chips and derail its pledge to increase its investment in Arizona. “New import restrictions could jeopardize current US leadership in the competitive technology industry and create uncertainties for many committed semiconductor capital projects in the US, including TSMC Arizona’s significant investment plan in Phoenix,” the chipmaker wrote in a letter to the US Department of Commerce. TSMC issued the warning in response to a solicitation for comments by the department on a possible tariff on semiconductor imports by US President Donald Trump’s
‘FAILED EXPORT CONTROLS’: Jensen Huang said that Washington should maximize the speed of AI diffusion, because not doing so would give competitors an advantage Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday criticized the US government’s restrictions on exports of artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, saying that the policy was a failure and would only spur China to accelerate AI development. The export controls gave China the spirit, motivation and government support to accelerate AI development, Huang told reporters at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The competition in China is already intense, given its strong software capabilities, extensive technology ecosystems and work efficiency, he said. “All in all, the export controls were a failure. The facts would suggest it,” he said. “The US
The government has launched a three-pronged strategy to attract local and international talent, aiming to position Taiwan as a new global hub following Nvidia Corp’s announcement that it has chosen Taipei as the site of its Taiwan headquarters. Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Monday last week announced during his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei that the Nvidia Constellation, the company’s planned Taiwan headquarters, would be located in the Beitou-Shilin Technology Park (北投士林科技園區) in Taipei. Huang’s decision to establish a base in Taiwan is “primarily due to Taiwan’s talent pool and its strength in the semiconductor
French President Emmanuel Macron has expressed gratitude to Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) for its plan to invest approximately 250 million euros (US$278 million) in a joint venture in France focused on the semiconductor and space industries. On his official X account on Tuesday, Macron thanked Hon Hai, also known globally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), for its investment projects announced at Choose France, a flagship economic summit held on Monday to attract foreign investment. In the post, Macron included a GIF displaying the national flag of the Republic of China (Taiwan), as he did for other foreign investors, including China-based
RSS