It’s a huge five-storey mall, the size of 800 football fields. It’s Mario ChevalIer, the only Frenchman living here, in Yiwu, din eastern China, for 14 years where he has been exporting all kinds of goods to the whole world, which is the guide: “You can find everything there ! It can range from pots to swimming pool accessories, including key rings. The suppliers are very reactive and as soon as there is a trending product, as soon with the Football World Cup, they all start making the products that work“, he enthuses.
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Wu Xiaoming confirms: “We have received many orders for the World Cup since the beginning of April. The most popular are footballs, the price of which is less than 1.5 euros. Demand far exceeds supply“, assures this seller specializing in sporting goods, who rubs shoulders with more than 80,000 other traders in Yiwu.
Particular advantage of the city: most of the products are manufactured in the nearby factories. And if the prices are so low, it is because the sellers, for the most part, use without authorization the logos of FIFA, Qatar 2022 or even the mascot of the World Cup, which begins on November 20, 2022, which we find on keyrings sold for only a few euro cents.
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“The workers work at night, sometimes during the day, then rest for two days…”
But the market experienced a few cold sweats: production suffered from very strict confinements due to Covid-19 in China – preventing all deliveries -, as well as the heat waves and drought of recent weeks.
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Today is therefore the final sprint for factories and suppliers, who must produce on time and deliver to customers before November. And then, since the beginning of the year, economically, the situation has become complicated: first the costs of transport have increased a lot, then there was inflation with the price of raw materials rising sharply.
And finally, untimely power cuts caused by the heat wave. “For the factories, currently, it is not easy to manage. They have power cuts by the government and the latter does not warn when it is going to cut the power. They have to adapt to work when they have power: the workers work at night, sometimes during the day, then rest for two days… It’s difficult to manage”, says Mario Chevalier.
But Yiwu still keeps smiling: more than 30 billion euros of goods have been exported from this market to nearly 200 countries since the beginning of 2022, including a large part of goods for the World Cup. If China is not qualified for the World Cup in Qatar, it has already won the title of first seller.