As the Trump administration's tariff war hurts Chinese exports, a shoemaker in east China's Zhejiang province is adjusting its market strategy swiftly, shifting to other global markets to offset trade turmoil and challenges.
Zhang Wenjie, the founder of the shoe-making company based in Zhejiang's Wenzhou, revealed that he resolutely declined recently a U.S. client who exploited market conditions and asked for his products at half the price.
Zhang started his company in 1993 and now produces 10 million pairs of shoes annually with over 2,500 employees. Seventy percent of Zhang's business has been for export, with the U.S. as a traditional key market.
In recent years, the company has diversified to new markets, and the latest U.S. tariff hikes are pushing him to do more.
"Our orders from the U.S. have dropped by more than 30 percent, which will undoubtedly have an impact, but I believe this impact will be short-lived," Zhang said. "Just like in recent days, we've received substantial orders from Portugal and Spain."
The order from Portugal, worth over 20 million yuan (over 2.7 million U.S. dollars), helped buffer the blow to his operations and gave him new encouragement.
"We've established subsidiaries in Dubai and Russia. We are expanding into markets in Australia and Southeast Asia. It is an essentially part of our global strategy," Zhang explained.
Zhang and his team are preparing for the third phase of the 137th Canton Fair from May 1 to 5, where they hope to secure new orders and continue penetrating international markets.
Chinese shoemaker seeks foothold in alternative markets amid US tariffs
A World Health Organization (WHO) medical epidemiologist on Sunday sought to ease public concerns over a hantavirus outbreak linked to a cruise ship, stressing that the virus is not airborne like COVID-19 and that the average person has no reason to worry.
Spain began evacuating passengers the same day from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius, which had anchored earlier off the Port of Granadilla on the island of Tenerife.
The MV Hondius departed Argentina on April 1 with more than 140 passengers and crew from 23 countries on board. The ship has reported eight infections, including three deaths. Six of the cases have been laboratory-confirmed as Andes virus infections, caused by a rodent-borne hantavirus endemic to South America and the only known hantavirus strain capable of limited human-to-human transmission.
Boris Pavlin, a medical epidemiologist with the WHO, said the cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak had been carefully managed by Spanish authorities and posed little risk to the general public. "This is not COVID. The average person does not need to be worried about hantavirus here in this setting. These folks are being managed very carefully, very deliberately, by the Spanish authorities; they're getting off the ship, they are getting into small boats, they are being spaced apart in the buses so there's no risk to one another. Even if one were to become symptomatic -- we know that none of them were symptomatic as they have been leaving the ship -- they're going straight to their aircraft and they're being taken to their respective national jurisdictions," he said.
Pavlin said the exact source of exposure remained under investigation, but the initial cases appeared to be linked to a pre-cruise land excursion in South America.
"From what we understand of the initial cases, there was -- as one does often on a cruise -- there was a land-side excursion before the cruise in which places were visited that are home to these specific rodents that are associated with the Andes hantavirus. These are not worldwide rodents; the long-tailed rice rat is very specific to the Andes Cordillera region of South America, and that's where people who are exposed to the rodents were. So it was in one of those places they were exposed. We don't know exactly because there are several possibilities, and I believe that the Argentinian authorities are actually even going to look at that and try to do some animal sampling to get to the very bottom of it. But that part's not unexpected at all," he said.
The official praised Spanish authorities' handling of the ship and described the response as a closely coordinated international effort.
"This has been an extremely cooperative, collegial international effort. The Spanish authorities are very diligent and deliberate about what's happening here. There's nothing that would surprise us. I think that somebody might become exposed; we want to obviously make sure that people who are coming off the ship are not newly exposed to one another as they get off and go to their respective places, and we're not seeing that," Pavlin said.
But while the immediate disembarkation process had gone smoothly, he emphasized that health officials were not letting their guard down.
"However, the contact tracing and follow-up of every person who has been in even the lightest contact with the patients will continue until a maximum incubation period. In any case, there are contingency plans should someone become ill, and we know that it doesn't just spread like wildfire, so even if they were to become ill, we don't expect a large outbreak after this," the official said.
Cruise ship hantavirus outbreak "not COVID," poses low public risk: WHO expert
