Chinese exporters tap into home market
- Source: Xinhua
- [15:15 May 18 2009]
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At a sales booth in a special trade fair here in southern China, Zhou was complaining how hard it was to sell her products.
Representatives of domestic buyers and exporting companies discuss possible business deals during an event at the 105th Canton Fair in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, on May 6, 2009.
"We sell them at factory-gate prices, but buyers still bargain. That makes me mad," said Zhou, a Taiwanese senior manager of Poly Dragon Industrial, which is based in the booming city of Dongguan neighboring Guangzhou, capital of China's manufacturing base Guangdong Province.
The trade fair she attended was co-organized by Guangdong and Hong Kong-listed e-commerce giant Alibaba.com. The two-day fair, opened on Saturday, was aimed to help small Chinese exporters tap into the domestic market amid weak overseas demand.
Organizers said the fair was attended by 400 small- and medium-sized exporting firms in Guangdong that displayed their company profiles at Alibaba's business-to-business division, and up to 30,000 big online sellers at taobao.com, China's largest consumer-to-consumer auction site owned by Alibaba.
Zhou's company, owned by a Taiwanese, produces high-end lighting, decorative accents and photo frames. More than 95 percent of its products are for export.
The financial crisis and global slump in demand for made-in-China products have taken a toll on tens of thousands of exporters in Guangdong, which produced more than a quarter of China's foreign trade last year.
In the first four months this year, Guangdong exported 98.5 billion US dollars worth of goods, down 17.8 percent year on year. Its exports continued to decline for the sixth consecutive month since last November. Nationally, exports in the first four months totaled 337.42 billion US dollars, down 20.5 percent.
Poly Dragon, though keeping its workforce of nearly 300 relatively stable, lost up to 20 percent of overseas orders. In response, it aimed to tap into the huge market to sell more products on the mainland. Last year it began to display the company profile in Chinese at Alibaba to attract domestic buyers. In the past, it only provided an English profile at Alibaba for overseas importers, Zhou said.
The road to return home, however, isn't easy. Besides cut-throat competition and a price war, she had to redesign many exporting products, which often featured Greek and Roman gods, angels and other religious figures from Western civilization.