The national offline wholesale market is another watershed in the world. Whale Merchant (ID: BizWhale) Original Creator |Dahl Wen.
Half a month ago, the United Nations officially set the Spring Festival as a holiday, at home and abroad cheering, Yiwu ushered in the "highlight moment", New Year's paintings, couplets, New Year's pendants and other rich Year of the Dragon zodiac Spring Festival products, is being sent to the world through a package.
Kicking into the "World Cup", "sweeping" Christmas, and "playing" the world, Yiwu has already become the birthplace of popular styles in everyone's minds. Although Yiwu is not absent from every national upsurge, and the total import and export value exceeds 500 billion yuan for the first time this year, it has not calmed everyone's sense of crisis.
Although the advantages of Yiwu ** chain are still there, the disappearance of the demographic dividend, the cost of raw materials, labor, logistics and warehousing is increasing, and traditional foreign trade enterprises are losing the low-cost advantage that they once relied on to survive, and the orders are showing the characteristics of "small and scattered", and the profit margin is gradually squeezed. In addition, the global interest e-commerce is all the rage, and the dividends brought by channel changes are also constantly impacting and washing the traditional business model.
The wind rises at the end of Qingping. For more than 40 years, the Yiwu market has always been with a "sense of crisis" to seek change, two financial crises before the contrarian growth, in this round of the market "Kangbo cycle", strong resilience again.
After more than 40 years of continuous transformation, this once impoverished inland city in Zhejiang Province is now home to hundreds of thousands of companies, whose customers come from China, Malaysia, Dubai, and even a small country in Africa, extending their tentacles to almost every corner of the world.
In the face of the changes of the times, the local ** is still unwilling to pace in place, in order to meet the new challenges and new opportunities of future business competition, break through the development ceiling, take the initiative to innovate again, spend nearly 10 billion yuan, build the sixth generation market, and create the "fourth space" of the future market for business people.
Luqiao is 290 kilometers away from Yiwu and about 3 hours by car. According to public information, there has been such a document in the archives of the Luqiao Industrial and Commercial Bureau: "The Yongyue Brigade invested 40,000 yuan in a 3,000-square-meter idle miscellaneous land to establish a small commodity market, and officially opened the trading ...... on June 4, 82”
In the recorded history of small commodity wholesale markets, Luqiao Market is the first. On September 5 of the same year, the first generation of Yiwu road market - Huqingmen haberdashery market in Choucheng Town was completed. Yiwu Market, which failed to become the birthplace of the small commodity market in Zhejiang and even the whole country, has caught up and developed from an open-air market to a fifth-generation international trade city. In 2005, the city was recognized by the United Nations as a world commodity center, a status that remains to this day.
Photo by Jin Fugen, Huqingmen haberdashery market, Choucheng Town.
The survival of the fittest, the laws of survival in nature are just as suitable for the fate of the market. As a large market province, Zhejiang Province from 1978 to 1998, the commodity market grew to 4,619, after 13 years of stability, since 2013, a number of low, small, scattered, chaotic markets have been eliminated, the number of markets optimized to the current 2,960. The road and bridge market is also in fierce competition and is gradually falling behind.
Looking at the whole country, the small commodity wholesale market in many places has gone through ups and downs, transformed and reorganized, and sought a new way out. In 2009, Xishan District, Yunnan Province started the upgrading and transformation of the commercial format of Luosiwan and the upgrading of the construction project of Luosiwan ** Business District. As one of the top ten small commodity wholesale markets in China, the transformation of the area is still unsatisfactory.
Wuhan Hanzheng Street, once known as the "first street in the world", was far ahead of the market transaction volume when the Yiwu market was just starting. However, this momentum of rapid development did not continue, and in 2005, the transaction volume fell from the top three of the top ten small commodity wholesale markets in the country to the seventh place.
When everyone thought that Hanzheng Street was in a slump and was about to "withdraw from the stage of history", Hanzheng Street opened a "second venture", and the logistics of clothing merchants, production workshops and warehouses were relocated, and the original "dirty and messy" workshops were transformed into shops and shops, only retaining the display and trading functions. As a result, Hanzheng Street is also gradually moving away from the small commodity wholesale market, and is more like a collection of many fashionable streets.
In fact,Yiwu does not have a unique innate advantage, and the physical market is also full of twists and turns in the process of development. Since the beginning of this year, the industrial belt represented by Yiwu has stood in the C position, and grabbing the industrial belt has become a tacit and unanimous action of cross-border e-commerce platforms。For example, Amazon launched the "Ten Ways to Set Sail for the Industrial Belt" support plan, and its global vice president and executive president of the Asia-Pacific region of the global store, Dai Rongfei, said that he hoped that more traditional manufacturing enterprises in the industrial belt would further give full play to the advantages of the first chain and accelerate the digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises.
In addition, the new cross-border e-commerce platform represented by SHEIN and TEMU has opened up the industrial belt by establishing its own logistics warehousing and distribution system, start-up self-operated full custody model, etc., and combined the full-link digital advantages of the platform with the production capacity advantages of traditional factories.
Many Yiwu merchants have also relied on these platforms to enter the international market again, and a number of cross-border e-commerce industrial bases such as Longhui Village have also emerged. In 2022, the annual transaction volume of cross-border e-commerce in Yiwu will reach 1083500 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 69%。This is undoubtedly a challenge for operators who focus on traditional channels.
Under the pattern of dual circulation at home and abroad, platforms such as 1688, iPurchase, and Jingdong have also successively opened digital pavilions on Yiwu Chinagoods. At the same time, with the relaxation of restrictions on market vendors in many first-tier cities, the "cloud stalls" of street stalls are out of the circle among young people, and the number of young buyers who go to Yiwu to "pan for gold" has only increased.
It is worth mentioning that the young purchasers, mainly in the Z generation, seem to be different from the older generation of buyers. Similarly, they share the same pursuit of a good product: high cost performance, high quality-price ratio, personalization and diversification. The difference is that they are more concerned about the emotional satisfaction obtained in the procurement process, which not only comes from the service itself, but also evaluates the attractiveness of the market to them based on the local experience of eating, drinking and playing.
The fifth-generation market, which has been in construction for ten years, is beginning to take shape in an unpredictable environment. Whale dealer discovery is mainly manifested in three aspects:The traditional market cannot carry the current diversified business model, a single business service is difficult to meet the diverse needs of buyers of different ages, and the existing physical space is gradually restricting the extension of new business formats.
In this context, the pattern of the "future market" is gradually becoming clear:The consumer demand is more diverse and the requirements are more complex, which has a stronger test on the flexibility, personality, characteristics and quality of commodity supplyOn the basis of the original richness, the supply side has accelerated towards industry verticalization and industrial specialization, and the factory manufacturing industry has accelerated its reshuffleBased on the adaptation of supply and demand, whether it is wholesale or retail, domestic trade or foreign trade, online or offline, there is a trend of de-intermediation and sinking of the source factoryWith the characteristics of social interaction and diversified consumption, the market not only provides commodity procurement, but also an important field for experience and exhibition promotion.
Previously, such a joke was popular on the Internet: After the maturity of autonomous driving, will it send me to the company, drive home by myself, and pick me up after work, if so, I hope it can go to Didi, take orders to earn extra money, and subsidize the family.
With the rapid development of a new generation of information technology, new technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are deeply embedded in people's production and life, and everyone has a lot of imagination for intelligent life. As a digital transformation platform for Yiwu's internal and external dual circulation, Chinagoods has recently ushered in an upgrade, actively exploring the use of AI mapping, AI generation of posters, AI translation, digital "boss lady" and other applications to find new growth for the company.
For market players, the value of the physical market is self-evident, but to adapt to the new scenarios brought about by the "future market", the market cannot remain unchanged. When visiting various industrial belts, whale merchants also found that the contradiction between the wholesale market and urban functions is always unavoidableOn the one hand, with the expansion of the city, after the suburban areas have become the core area of the main city, if you want to upgrade the urban function, you have to move the market outwardOn the other hand, CBD business districts are often associated with internationally renowned brands, wholesale markets, especially small commodities, and it is difficult to have the ability to "hang out".
Yiwu operators also described their daily "rush" route to the whale merchants with a slight "complaint": the business location is in the international trade city, the factory is in the west of the city, the warehouse is in Beiyuan, and the office and entertainment of large customers are not in the same direction. This is the daily epitome of many Yiwu people, when work and life can be together, put a question mark in their hearts.
According to the "Yiwu Release" report, in 2023, a total of 51 exhibitions of various types will be held in the Yiwu Professional Exhibition Hall throughout the year, with an average of one exhibition per week. The exhibition has always been an important window for Yiwu small commodities to be displayed to the outside world. With the changes of the times, the new cloud exhibition has begun to show its edge, and the wisdom exhibition hall has planted "seeds" in everyone's hearts.
The Yiwu market that actively seeks change and has the courage to challengeTwo years ago, we made up our minds to start from the needs of buyers and operators, and invest more than 8 billion yuan to build a new market under the guidance of digitalization. After breaking ground at the end of 2022, the mystery of the sixth-generation market at the 2023 World Yiwu Conference - the Global Digital Trade Center was gradually revealed. The total area of the project is 5616 acres, with a central layout, composed of four major plates: market, commercial office building, commercial block and apartment.
Compared with the traditional market, the market of the global digital trade center is more international, modern and digital, and pays more attention to the creation of consumption scenarios, providing a large area of exhibition space, providing 10 Gigabit network and cross-border network access in the setting of business locations, equipping smart communities in residential apartments, and empowering office buildings and smart shopping malls with the help of emerging technologies such as AI, Internet of Things, and 5G, so as to create new business formats and make the occupants better and more focused on operation.
In addition to providing multi-level services in a multi-space combination, the global digital trade center is no longer limited to dividing the market by "category", and the person in charge of the Yiwu market has initially put forward the idea of "one category, one industry, one market". A market is composed of upstream and downstream enterprises in a certain industry, where full-link services such as design and production, order fulfillment, mobile payment, logistics and transportation are realized, creating a benchmark industry market, attracting global buyers, and strengthening the market "moat".
In the central area of the global digital trade center, the layout is the "digital brain". Today, digital transformation has changed from an optional to a mandatory option for enterprises. With the continuous development of cloud computing, the industry cloud platform is becoming the first choice for enterprises to accelerate their business plans, and the "digital brain" will also become the birthplace of the industry cloud platform in the Yiwu market.
The construction of the industry cloud platform is one of the directions worthy of continuous investment in the construction of Yiwu market executives, because it directly points to helping operators reduce costs and increase efficiency. For example, it provides production management, quality control, logistics management and other functions to reduce labor costsConnect transaction orders, production data, product innovation and other information, analyze data in real time, and improve operational efficiency.
In addition, in the development process of "one industry and one market", digital products such as vertical e-commerce procurement platforms will also be built simultaneously to build a new market scenario of online and offline, cloud-network-end linkage, and provide buyers with one-stop services from product selection, merchant docking, settlement, logistics to settlement and after-sales, and provide transaction convenience for domestic and foreign customers.
In the 80s of the 20th century, the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg proposed the concept of "third space", which generally refers to the social space that can be used for people to relax, recreation, gather and communicate since the family space and work space.
Over the years, the concept has unexpectedly become popular, and Starbucks has taken it to the extreme, becoming the "top stream" of the coffee industry.
From another point of view, the Global Digital Trade Center is a "fourth place" for business people. The first space is industry, the second space is office, and the third space is lifeThe fourth space can open up the comprehensive trading market of the first three reintegration, which is not a single "procurement market", but a comprehensive trading market that gathers functional formats such as R&D and design, fashion manufacturing, display, online celebrity live broadcast, office life, etc., which can realize a optimization of closed-loop services and a new attempt to link the market with the industry.
Bicycle sacks come, luxury cars and watches go. This seemingly **-style slogan is still regarded as a guideline by some people who go to Yiwu. The post-95 couple set up a stall to sell snacks and earned 9,000 yuan a day, and the Syrian businessman purchased fake flowers and returned to China to sell them to earn 150,000 yuan......Similar stories have been told.
Yiwu is also a city haunted by "myths", in the relevant reports of Yiwu, the hot commodities here are ridiculed for which team can win the World Cup, and who ......is the next one in the United StatesThis "supermarket of the world" is like a magnet, attracting people from all over the world to take this as the starting point of their dreams.
According to incomplete statistics, Yiwu will introduce 3 college students from January to August 202350,000 people. The creation of the "fourth space" will also attract a large number of businesses and producer service enterprises to settle in, and will provide a large number of employment opportunities. "People" is the core of production factors, and the industrial ecology can better cultivate new professionals by linking universities and research institutes, and stimulate the "live" of business entities with the "excellent" business environment, so that the cultivation of talents and the use of talents can be seamlessly matched.
Behind a small commodity is a big market, and behind a small business is a big world. Yiwu market often talks about "front store and back factory", and entering the new era of digitalization, Yiwu market has created more "new stores" and "new factories". Under such a unique business model, Yiwu has gathered a large number of high-quality and low-price commodities, enriching the diversity of commodities.
Yiwu's "fourth space" takes the integration of market and industry as the coreThe original "front store and back factory" model will also be renovated. However, this kind of change is not to overturn and reinvent, but to iterate on the original model, touch the "front store" with one hand, tap the product hotspots and pain point needs, connect the "back factory" service with the other hand, optimize the industrial chain, and keep the market alive and passionate.
In all parts of the world, there are countless small commodity wholesale markets, but in order to continue to have a sense of freshness and attract a steady stream of buyers to Yiwu, in addition to a plate of good goods, the market itself also needs to continue to iterate. The Global Digital Trade Center is built with "people" as the center, "goods" as the connection, and service as the cornerstoneThe new field of "market + industry" linkage tries to create the forefront of Chinese manufacturing brands going overseas and the vane of high-quality popular models, which will become a new "fuel" for the market and achieve healthy and sustainable development.
In the "Top 100 Comprehensive Commodity Markets in China" released on November 8, 2023, the Yiwu market once again led the way. The story of Yiwu's leading position is usually used to prove the success of the market, and it is copied to overseas regions along the "Belt and Road".
From the financing and construction of the small commodity market in the early stage, to the market "zoning and returning to the market", and then cleaning up the market environment, cracking down on counterfeit and shoddy goods, and compiling the "Yiwu China Small Commodity Index", making it a weather vane of small commodities and a barometer of the big market......Behind every key node, there is an invisible "hand".
In Yiwu, there has never been a shortage of "inexplicable", "out of nothing" and "stone into gold" stories, looking at the world affected by geopolitics, the pattern of a big country is constantly changing, a bigger and stronger Yiwu is a Yiwu people eager to have, but also the people of the whole country want to see a representative city.
In April 2023, the General Office of the People's Republic of China issued the "Opinions on Promoting the Stable Scale and Optimal Structure of Foreign Trade", which will make greater efforts to promote the stable scale and optimal structure of foreign trade from five aspects: strengthening the promotion of market expansion, stabilizing and expanding the scale of import and export of key products, increasing financial support, accelerating the innovation and development of foreign trade, and optimizing the development environment of foreign trade.
It is foreseeable that the international digital trade center is under construction, using digital methods to open up the "Berlin Wall" of the market and industry, based on the underlying architecture of the industry cloud platform, creating a variety of digital and intelligent products, conforming to the general trend of rapid development of big data, manufacturing and the Internet, with the goal of "one industry and one market", giving full play to the "siphon effect" of the Yiwu market, allowing practitioners from multiple industries to gather in Yiwu, setting up a new vane in China, telling a new Yiwu story in the initiative of jointly building the "Belt and Road", and reconstructing the world's first The "head goose" effect is played in the chain.