The YiWu Commodities Market

A brief bit of background for context. YiWu is the world’s largest supermarket. YiWu is a small town (it’s actually a city with more than one million people, but in China that’s a small town) in Zhejiang Province, 45 minutes by high-speed rail from Shanghai. The surrounding area contains countless thousands of smallish (and some largish) factories producing vast amounts of small goods – hand and small electric tools, umbrellas, bags and luggage, toys, giftware, small appliances, kitchenware, small electronic items, adhesive tape. The products are mostly standard utilitarian items we generally refer to as commodities.

With this intense concentration of manufacturing clusters, YiWu has the largest commodity markets in the world. The largest wholesale factory market in YiWu, the International Trade Center, consists of eight 5-story buildings totaling about 5 million square meters and containing about 80,000…