The second installment of The Paper's "Yiwu Always New" series, published October 29, looked at the first year of Yiwu's sixth-generation market — the Global Digital Trade Center, which opened on October 14 last year opposite the fifth-generation market. More than 47,000 entities applied to move in, and 3,700-plus merchants eventually settled into the 1.25-million-square-meter complex.
Among the first tenants, "second-generation" merchants and "new-generation" entrepreneurs account for 52%, and merchants owning their own brands or operating IP products make up 68% — marking a generational upgrade from the old market. Fu Hua, who ran whiteboard and smart-trash-bin businesses for over a decade, pivoted to wholesale all-category robots and opened the market's first robot store, with foreign-trade orders approaching half of revenue.
The new market answered a question the outside world posed at its launch: in an era when business moves online, what is the use of a physical market? A year on, the answer is written in the building — experience-driven sourcing, robotics and AI products, and a blend of online and offline that keeps aisles packed during holidays.
The center shows how Yiwu is evolving from a low-price workshop into a platform for branded, design-led and technology-rich global trade.
Source: The Paper
