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Yiwu Fair 2016

Yiwu Fair 2016, the top3 tradeshow in China, the largest fair on Daily Consumer Goods (General Merchandise, Small Commodities, Articles of Daily Use, Daily Household Necessities, Small Household Articles, Various Household Supplies, Groceries, Consumer Products ) will be held in October 2015. Yiwu Fair 2015 alias China Yiwu International Commodities Fair 2016.

Date: 21-25 October, 2016

Venue: Yiwu Meihu Exhibition Center

Exhibits of Yiwu Fair 2016:

Stationery & Office Supplies, Sports Goods, Toys, Knitting Accessories, Garment, Footwear & Headwear, Arts & Crafts, Gifts, Decorations, Home Appliances, Cosmetics & Beauty-care Products, Cases & Bags, Hardware & Machinery, Electronic & Electrical Appliances, Trade Services etc.

Brief Introduction of Yiwu Fair 2016:

Yiwu Fair is the largest daily commodities fair on scale. During the Yiwu Fair, activities such as International Market Seminar and purchase-matching Meeting for Multinational Retailing Groups will be held to provide more valuable information and abundant business opportunities to the visitors. The Yiwu Fair is attended by around 120,000 visitors. An estimated 3,500 companies will be exhibiting 2015 Yiwu Fair, occupying over 6,000 booths in a floor space of 150,000sqm. Yiwu Fair has been held for 20 successive years since 1995. It is held in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province in October every year. In 2002, it was upgraded as an international commodities fair. Since then, the event has been jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Government and other relevant authorities. The Yiwu Fair, as a highly internationalized and informative event with excellent services and security, has become one of the largest, most influential and most productive commodities fairs in China. It has become the third largest exhibition sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, ranking only next to the China Import and Export Fair in Guangzhou(Canton Fair) and the East China Fair in Shanghai. Yiwu Fair was honored as China’s Best Managed Exhibition in 2005, one of the 2006 Top Ten Exhibitions in China, China’s Best-outcome Exhibition in 2006, and the 2007 Top Quality Exhibition in Yangtze River Delta in China. Yiwu Fair was firstly held in 1995 and 2016 Yiwu Fair will be the 22nd session in its history. It was upgraded as an international commodities fair in 2002. Since then, the event has been jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce, Zhejiang Provincial People’s Government and other relevant authorities.

Facts of Yiwu Fair 2016:

Exhibition Area: 150,000 square meters Exhibition Booths of International Standard: 4,500 Exhibitors: More than 2,500 Professional Traders: 120,000 Overseas Traders: 19,000 Overseas Trading Groups: 80

Organizers of Yiwu Fair 2016:

Ministry of commerce of the People’s Republic of China People’s Government of Zhejiang Province China Council for the Promotion of International Trade China National Light Industrial Council China General Chamber of Commerce

Co-organizers of Yiwu Fair 2016:

State Administration for Industry and Commerce All China Federation of Industry and Commerce Hong Kong Trade Development Council Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency

Sponsors of Yiwu Fair 2016:

Department of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation of Zhejiang Province People’s Government of Yiwu City













































Friday 01 August 2014

Yiwu, the 'magical' Chinese city supplying Poundland with cheap goods for Britain

Poundland has become one of the most common sights on Britain's high streets, with 430 branches around the country. Few, though, know how they manage it. The answer, reports Tom Phillips, lies in the Chinese city of Yiwu.

Workers package bandages at the Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co. Ltd factory on the outskirts of Yiwu, Zhejiang Province.
Workers package bandages at the Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co. Ltd factory on the outskirts of Yiwu, Zhejiang Province. Photo: Qilai Shen
By , Yiwu
11:42AM GMT 23 Mar 2013
Comments241 Comments
Down a dirt track on the outskirts of this sprawling trading hub with a population of two million, four towering buildings have sprouted from the brown earth.
Outside, construction workers and earth-diggers put the final touches to the brand-new headquarters of local manufacturer, Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co. Ltd.
A view of the just completed Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co. Ltd manufacturing complex
Inside, dozens of women sit on a production line, feverishly cramming tiny packets of plasters into yellow and blue cartons. Once full, the cartons are placed inside cardboard boxes marked "Made in China by people who care".
"We have no idea where these products will go," said one factory worker, 52-year-old Shen Youfeng. "There are no Chinese characters on the packets just some foreign language." But the answer is Poundland, and discount stores like it across the globe, where shelves droop under the weight of products made by Chinese workers in factories in the trading boomtown of Yiwu.
Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity is one of thousands of firms in Yiwu churning out vast quantities of staggeringly cheap goods that can be bought from Los Angeles to Liverpool, often for £1 or less.
"We have many customers in the UK," boasted Gong Chunjuan, the company's foreign exports manager. "Poundland, Poundworld, 151 and other companies also." Within months, the plasters and first aid kits being produced here will be shipped to pound and dollar stores around the world, including Britain.
Discount stores have proliferated on British high streets, as the recession drives a demand for rock-bottom prices. While major high-street names have gone bust, the profits of budget retail outlets like Poundland have soared.
Shen Youfeng packages bandages at the Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co. Ltd factory
But without places such as Yiwu - a landlocked trade hub in China's eastern Zhejiang province - such success would be impossible.
Until just a few decades ago, Yiwu was an unremarkable rural town, unknown even to most Chinese. Now, it is an essential destination for foreign businesspeople who make make regular bargain-seeking pilgrimages to the city's International Trade Market.
Reputedly the largest and cheapest wholesale market on earth, Yiwu's 4-million-square-metre bazaar consists of some 62,000 outlets that sell an estimated 1.7 million different products, largely produced in factories across south and southeast China, including Yiwu itself.
Hotel rooms come equipped with a "Shopping and Tourism Map" promoting the city as "an ocean of commodities a paradise for shopping". The market did £4.9 billion worth of business in 2010, according to local officials.
"It is like a magnet attracting business around the world," proclaims the promotional pamphlet of one export logistics firm that helps foreign customers ship containers loaded with cheap produce to their markets. "If one spends three minutes in each booth and walks eight hours a day it will take a whole year to walk through the market."
There is little that cannot be found at Yiwu's smoky, four-storey trade market building.
A view of a shop front displaying stuffed toys at the China Commodity City in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province
There are key rings featuring images of the Virgin Mary and Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes, and there are six-foot-long cuddly sharks.
For 10 yuan - just over £1 - there are Russian and Spanish editions of Monopoly, as well as sex toys and fluorescent bath mats. Boxing gloves in the national colours of Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and even the tiny African archipelago of Cape Verde can be purchased, in lots of 1,200, for around 17p. Union Jack furry dice go for the equivalent of 14p.
In another corner - past tiny stalls hawking "Powder Cockroach killing bait" and "Mouse and Rat Glue" - shoppers can purchase three-dimensional puzzles of global landmarks such Big Ben and "Tower Brideg" [sic]. Prices range from 20p to 95p.
"Not much is known about the earliest London Bridge although it's [sic] location is thought to be near the presesnt [sic] one," reads a description on one puzzle's box.
"Most of our clients are from the Middle East," the apologetic shop-owner said of the spelling mistakes.
Yiwu is also responsible for dressing football fans from Rio de Janeiro to Riyadh. The windows of Wells Knitting a Yiwu scarf outlet - are filled with 32p woolly hats and 80p football scarfs for teams large and small: Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea, as well as Preston North End and Exeter City FC.
"We have supplied nearly everyone," said its owner, Wu Pengxu, 29, who claimed to have produced 4,000 different types of scarf since founding the company in 2007 with capital of around £20,000.
Wu Pengxu, owner of the Yiwu Wells Knitting Products Co., Ltd factory
Yiwu's rise has not just transformed the international retail market. It has also radically changed the lives of many locals, turning once-poor farmers into well-paid executives and millionaire factory-owners.
Born to a family of subsistence farmers, Gong Chunjuan or "Carole" as overseas customers call her has risen to become the foreign export manager for Yiwu's Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co. Ltd.
"When we were small we just stayed in the village, we knew nothing about the outside world," said the English-speaking Ms Gong, who studied law at a Shanghai university before returning home to Yiwu. Last year, she made her first trip to the UK, which accounts for around 30 per cent of the company's sales and where she is hoping to secure a contract with Boots.
"There have been big changes," she said, sitting in her office on an industrial estate 20 miles from the city's market. "Yiwu is changing every year - new buildings, new markets, new products and also many new customers." Yu Hexi, 52, the manager of Yiwu Beautiful Life Flower Co. Ltd a local firm that makes the imitation flowers that adorn the heads of women across Europe has fared even better.
"I never imagined, or even dared to imagine, that I would enjoy such a good life now," he said. His parents were once part of a rural Communist production team. Now, he runs a company with an annual turnover of more than half a million pounds.
"When I was little, we were really, really poor. My parents were peasants.
We didn't have enough food. Now our family has three cars. We built the best house in our village."
Around 10 per cent of his company's 2 million floral brooches and hair clips goes to the UK each year. The flowers he makes start at around 2.2 yuan - 23p - each and are sold by the thousand.
Yu Hexi, owner of the Yiwu Beautiful Flower Co. Ltd
Not all of Yiwu's residents have achieved such startling success, with hoards of impoverished migrant workers packing into cramped dormitories around the city.
At the recently built head office of Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co.Ltd - the medical supplies firm which also sells to the UK's 99p Stores and Castleford-based firm OTL - factory workers said they put in 10-hour days, with two days off each month. For that, they are paid around £320.
Still, they say, the work is good. "I'm quite content with my job otherwise I wouldn't have stayed here for so long," said Wang Jinfang, a 42-year-old who has worked at the factory for 10 years.
"There have been big changes in recent decades," she added, without pausing from her packing duties on the production line. "The city is getting better year after year. The most important change for me is that more factories are bringing more job opportunities." Shen Youfeng, 52, who works in the factory alongside her 18-year-old daughter, Feng Xueqing, agreed. "It is not really hard work for me. I couldn't stand working in a supermarket at my age," she said.
Once a rural backwater, Yiwu now claims a population of close to 2 million.
Its chaotic, dusty streets are lined with hotels emblazoned with names such as "Beverley Business Apartments", the "Green and Ecological hotle" [sic], the "Fortune Hotel", the "Milan Holiday Hotel" and even the "Feilin Hot Hotel".
One of Yiwu's main thoroughfares is home to a restaurant called Kabul Darbar Afghan Halal Cuisine, a mosque and a theme park called "The Rubik's Cube Music Plaza". Nearby an adult entertainment venue bears the name: "Professional Gathering Agency".
Businesspeople from across the globe pour through Yiwu's modern airport, and hotel lobbies hum with the chatter of Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, Turkish - and the Queen's English.
"The reason we are here is that the price is phenomenal," said 47-year-old Leeds businessman Mark Cohen, who was on his eighth trip to Yiwu to buy jewellery and fashion accessories for the Sheffield-based company Mac Imports.
"The quality used to be no good and the prices would be very cheap. Now the quality is acceptable and the price is still very cheap," added Mr Cohen, who said he generally spent around £200,000 per trip. "Customers in the UK want it cheap. Everybody wants the retail stuff under £5."
Ian Hunt, 62, a Liverpool-based merchant on his first trip to Yiwu, said the main challenge was simply finding the right product in such a huge space. "It is like finding a needle in a haystack."
But the party may not last for ever. Local factory owners said overheads were rising and complained that it was increasingly hard to find staff. Mr Cohen said he had also heard talk of jewellery manufacturing being moved to Vietnam because wages and other costs there were cheaper.
Mr Wu, the owner of the scarf manufacturer Wells Knitting, admitted he was also feeling the strain of rising production costs and planned to retreat to his home province, Henan, in five years time to open a business there.
Until then, however, it was full-steam ahead. At his three-storey factory on Yiwu's Niansanli industrial estate, he enthused about plans to open a new plant this year to handle a recent order for three million Brazil 2014 World Cup scarfs, which he said would eventually be sold by Carrefour, the French-owned supermarket chain.
Around him workers were churning out the company's latest creation: Harry Potter-themed scarfs emblazoned with the words "Gryffindor" and "Slytherin".
Beside heaps of those scarves, being prepared for a US client, lay the remnants of another recent order: 5,000 green Hamas scarves, commissioned by a businessman from Dubai.
"Yiwu," Mr Wu said, puffing on an expensive Chinese cigarette, "is a magical place."

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Delivering on the promise #1: the Export Invoice

Back when we were talking about UN Standards and Proformas, we looked at the way the Proforma is a statement of your contract of sale – it’s a promise between you and your customer, that you will deliver and they will pay.
Now that we’ve looked at the process, let’s look at the documentation on the delivery of the goods your customer ordered. In this article, the Export Invoice (also known as the Commercial Invoice); in the next, the Packing List. There are other documents you’ll likely use, and we’ll cover them afterwards, but these two are central. Whatever other documents you need to achieve delivery, these two must always be there.

What is it for?

An Export or Commercial Invoice has two functions:
  • to act as a Bill of Sale, telling your customer how much to pay, and when and how to pay it, and what they are paying for;
  • to act as a Customs document, telling both outbound and destination customs what the goods are, the applicable Harmonised Code, and the value of the goods.
Each function is as important as the other, which is why an Export Invoice must have more  information than a standard invoice.

What’s required?

Back in our article “All the Pretty Ducks in a Row“, there’s a list of all the required information for a Proforma. The information required on your Export Invoice is the same, with two exceptions: Lead Time and Transit Time. Let’s take a look at each of the sections:
Parties:
This section appears at the top left of your Export Invoice, right below the line that says “Export Invoice”.  It contains three boxes: Shipper, Consignee and Notify Party. What are they?
Shipper is the individual or company that is the exporter of record. This is required because this is not a simple instrument of payment; it’s also a clearance document. Where export permits are required, this is the party that must hold the export permit; it’s also the party that local Customs will contact if more information is required.
Consignee is the individual or company that is the importer of record, for similar reasons; they’re not only the party that will receive the goods, but they must be the holder of any import permit required at destination. In the case of a Letter of Credit, this might be the bank.
Notify party doesn’t always have any information, but it’s there if a third party at destination needs to be notified when the goods arrive – for instance, a Customs Broker or Import service provider who will deal with the clearance at destination.

Transaction information:

This group of data includes any Buyer’s Reference to be used, for example a Purchase Order number; the Exporter’s Reference, which is your reference, such as a Shipment Number or Job Number; the Invoice Number, the Incoterm to be used for the transaction and the method of payment or payment terms for the transaction.
Incoterm and method of payment are not the same; the Incoterm covers the assignment of risk in transit, as well as who is paying for what. See Taming the Bureaucracy for some more detailed information on Incoterms – there are links to further information in the Incoterms section of that article.

Shipment and transport information:

Aside from the Incoterm, this group of information is most of what’s required for Customs. Data such as the Country of Origin and Destination will tell Customs whether Import Permits for the destination are required before outbound shipments can be released. Each of the following items must be included.
  • Country Of Origin – the country where the goods are manufactured or produced;
  • Country of Final Destination – the country the goods are to be shipped to;
  • Port of Loading – the port the goods are to be shipped from;
  • Port of Discharge – the port the goods are to be shipped to;
  • Final Destination – location of delivery if not port of discharge;
  • Shipping method and transport information (flight or voyage numbers, for instance).

Cargo information:

This part of the Export Invoice is used by both your customer and by Customs. Destination Customs will use this information to determine whether and how much duty and tax should be levied on your customer at import time. You must include all the following information:
  • Quantity;
  • Description of Goods;
  • Harmonised Code of the goods;
  • Price;
  • Insurance and freight if priced separately (these items are not dutiable so should be separated if possible);
  • Currency to be used for the transaction.

Your payment information:

  • Name of your bank – the branch address isn’t needed, as your BSB/Sort Code will give that;
  • Account name;
  • BSB or Sort Code & Account Number;
  • SWIFT or BIC  – International Bank Identification Code.

Formalising information:

  • Place of issue of the Invoice (your city);
  • Date of Issue;
  • Name of Authorised Signatory;
  • Authorised Signature.

 Layout and the UN standard

We showed the layout for the Proforma Invoice in the article The Allure of a Well-Turned Proforma. The layout for the Invoice is virtually the same:

Next time, we’ll take a detailed look at the Packing List – another core document for your Export shipments.

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