Unimaginably gigantic cell-phone market in Shenzhen
Bunnie Huang reports on his trip to a mind-crogglingly gigantic mobile phone market in the industrial city of Shenzhen, on the PRC/Hong Kong border:
Mobile Phone Mega-Market in Shenzhen
The other crazy thing about the mobile phone market is that it’s not the only one. Windell said he found another market just as big but with a greater focus on finished phones, and then just today I walked into what looked like the New York Stock Exchange of mobile phones. This last find was really fascinating; there is a spot in the heart of the market where you have chain smoking traders sitting in booths piled high with finished mobile phones in plastic sleeves ready for sale on the gray market. It’s so packed and frenzied that from across the building when I looked over in that area I thought maybe a small disaster had occurred and people were gathering around to watch it. Each trading booth had a price list sitting in front; it’s the only place in China where I’ve seen a written price for a phone (but presumably you haggled over prices anyways). People were scampering around the the exchange, carrying sleeves of five, ten, twenty mobile phones. I probably saw at least a few hundred phones move through the exchange in the few minutes that it took me to walk a corner of it; I imagine thousands, if not tens of thousands, of phones move through that exchange in one day. Near that area are dozens of booths selling batteries for these phones … and the best part about these battery booths is that there is a girl sitting in each with raw lithium ion batteries and a pile of Nokia stickers, and she is literally building the fake batteries right before your eyes. She even has the holographic Nokia authenticity stamp; the finished batteries look exactly like the real thing. I asked one of them to sell me a sheet of the holo-stamps, but she wanted 1 USD per stamp because “they were of a high grade” or “the real thing” (I couldn’t quite understand the chinese words she used). I was trying to argue her down on price and apparently if I didn’t want to pay her price I could find a lower grade of stamp in other booths for less but she would not carry such shoddy merchandise in her booth. Ironic.
(Image: the Cellphone Monopoly Supermarket in nearby Guangzhou -- not nearly as impressive as Shenzhen's SEG Market, but funnier!)
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What's more interesting than the "original" holographic stamps is probably the fact also the lithium battery are the same quality of nokia's one.
When you choose to delocalize, completely outsource, and sell low cost stuff at high margins you can't actually complain, after all.
Shenzhen's SEG Market is wild but is most assuredly not the only place with written prices for a phone. In my experience almost any mall (built for chinese consumers, not westerns) will have prices for phones written down. Last year I was astonished to see the HTC diamond for 5000RMB in a noname mall in Shunyi. That's the thing people railing against globalization and china don't get - these folks are heavy duty consumers. Quit whining and figure out what to sell to them.
There was a place like this in Wuxi, Jiangsu when I was there in 2001/2002 but it was in a series of connected basements under the city... an amazing underground labyrinth of tech...
a billion chattering voices, all talking about what?
#4: stuff that's important to them, presumably. Ubiquitous communication is ace.
At the Robinson's mall in Sri Racha, Thailand, an entire floor of the six story mall is nothing but mobile phone dealers. Given that they're all basically selling the same products, I remain totally bewildered by the seeming redundancy, but they're always busy.
American gymns are about 100'x60', so two of them would be about 100'x120'. Bunnie didn't say how many shops are packed in that area though.
In Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), there's Low Yat Plaza, about 100x100'. First floor is mostly mobile phones, while 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floor are for computers and computer accessories. The shops are small (maybe about 5m x 10m) but the layout is like a shopping mall, with wide walkways between shops, rather than packed tight, market styled stalls of 2x3m. Many shops occupy more than one lot, so there aren't that many shops. I didn't count them, but I'm guessing about 20 phone shops, and 50+ computer shops all in one building.
The computer parts are really really cheap, and I'm told the phones are cheap too. Some of the phone shops hang out signs saying "dealers only" (maybe it's easier to sell to dealers, and they buy more items than end users).
Next to Low Yat, there's Imbi Plaza. It's much older, about 1/2 the size, 2 floors. About 30+ computer shops.
Also next to Low Yat is Sungai Wang Plaza (literally River of Money). A regular shopping mall that regularly rents out parts of the free walkways to phone stalls (one or two display shelf/tables) for a week or two. At these times, there'll be about 20 stalls selling complete phones.
About 1km away, there's Pasar Road, for many years, a well known place for electronics. There are about 30 to 50 shops selling things like transistors, diodes, cables, sockets/plugs, and cheap electrical stuff from China like US$20 dvd players, US$5 cordless mics, etc. (These are regular shops, not lots in a shopping complex).
Behind that is a giant 100+ stall wet market (vegetables, meat, fish), snaking along one of the smaller roads for maybe 50 - 100m. (The road is no longer functional, due to all the stalls on it).