The relentless heatwave drying up Europe's mighty Rhine and Danube rivers is driving a surge in orders for cooling and water-saving products from the world's largest small-commodity market in Yiwu, east China's Zhejiang Province.
At the Yiwu International Trade City, merchants are scrambling to keep up with orders from Europe. Zhang Changjun, a small-appliance vendor, is feeling the heat in the best possible way. A repeat British client, after testing samples, placed a rush order for 1,500 wall-mounted air-cooling fans last week.
"He ordered wall-mounted air cooling fans. This customer is from the UK. He needs 1,000 UK standard power plugs. He plans to airlift some over first, and then ship the rest with larger containers. He airlifted 200 units," said Zhang.
Another business owner, Chen Jianping, is seeing a similar phenomenon. Her phone buzzes nonstop with new inquiries from European buyers for hand-held fans. Usually by this time, she starts to switch to winter products, but this year, the sales cycle for cooling items has stretched much longer.
"Currently, Europe has the most inquiries. In previous years, shipping would have been almost over by this time, but now we're getting more and more inquiries. Before, our customers might be those selling small appliances, but now they are department store owners, jewelry sellers, and stationery sellers. Our sales went up by 20 percent," Chen said.
With European rivers at historic lows due to the drought coming after the heat, water conservation has become a daily necessity and a new business frontier.
Liu Junming, a kitchen and bathroom hardware vendor, has mastered the art of saving every drop, and European buyers are rewarding him with record orders. Liu demonstrated his best-selling water-saving product: a kitchen faucet with an adjustable flow control.
"Our valve cores used to be 30mm, but now we use 25mm ones for our European shipments, resulting in a significantly reduced flow rate. They particularly appreciate the water-saving features. So, the export volume to Europe used to be, for example, only 1,000 or 2,000 units per month, but now it's much higher. Last month, for instance, it was 10,000 units," said Liu.
Europe's heatwave boosts orders for Chinese cooling, water-saving products in YIwu
Chinese stock markets dropped on Monday, as AI and tech stocks continued to see-saw, according to China Global Television Network (CGTN) market analyst Timothy Pope.
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed down 0.59 percent at 3,882.01 points, with the Shenzhen Component Index, which has more exposure to the tech sector, closing 2.13 percent lower at 13,794.29 points.
Trading volumes on the two indices rose with around 2.01 trillion yuan (about 296.28 billion U.S. dollars) traded on Monday, up from 1.88 trillion yuan (about 280 billion U.S. dollars) last Friday.
Traditional sectors such as precious metals, coal mining, and insurance led the gains, while bio-tech stocks were among the top decliners.
The ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, lost 3.21 percent to close at 3,431.89 points on Monday.
The STAR Composite Index, which tracks the performance of stocks on China's sci-tech innovation board, closed 3.10 percent lower on Monday at 1,896.16 points.
"The A-share markets seem locked in this cycle of rally and rout for those growth stocks, particularly in the AI and adjacent sectors. Today was very much on the rout side so, while the Shanghai Composite Index was down 0.6 percent, we saw the Shenzhen Component down more than 2 percent, the ChiNext board was down 3.2 percent and the STAR 50 down 3.1 percent. Those last three are more exposed to the tech rally than the Shanghai Composite. The big losers as I said were AI hardware companies - Shenzhen Gongjin Electronics was down 10 percent, Zhongji Innolight fell more than 7 percent. But they weren't alone because the other big winning sector of the last few weeks - biotech - was in retreat today as well. Investors were rotating into gold and coal stocks as well, and agricultural stocks extended the food security trade rally that we saw at the end of last week. There were a number of stocks across those sectors, all of those were hitting the upper limits of trade today," said Pope.
Pope said the rest of the week will be dominated by earnings reports from some of China’s biggest companies.
"The rest of the week is going to be mostly about earnings. The end-of-August filing deadline is fast approaching. Friday will be a really big day on the earnings calendar. We've got BYD, PetroChina, Shenhua Energy and a lot of big banks as well. Earnings that we are going to see for ICBC, China Merchants Bank and others will give us an insight into how much pressure the big banks are under with their margins. BYD is also going to be an interesting one in light of the government's anti-involution campaign and its efforts to avert a bit of a race to the bottom in the EV sector. And before we get there, there are Nvidia results in the US on Wednesday which will doubtless impact every stock in the AI space," he said.
Chinese stock markets start week lower on AI volatility: analyst
