China’s “618 mid-year shopping festival”, which falls in the middle of June each year, is revealing the country’s consumption potential of lower-tier cities.

According to Wang Tao, chief analyst of a big data research center under Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, during this year’s “618 shopping festival”, lower-tier markets outpaced first- and second-tier cities in the growth of orders of 3C products, namely computer, communication and consumer electronics for the first time .

Pinduoduo data indicated that nearly half of the orders of Apple’s latest AirPods earphones came from lower-tier markets, and a great number of smart phones manufactured by Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo also went to these markets.

Residents from first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai didn’t show too much enthusiasm for the mid-year shopping festival, saying they can shop whenever they want. On the contrary, online shoppers from small cities and towns were quite excited about the mid-year discount and were actively sharing coupon links.

A report by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com noted that individualized and diversified consumption is becoming popular as sales channels go much deeper to lower-tier cities. In such an environment, the customer-oriented C2M (Customer-to-Manufacturer) model is expected to be more trendy.

The C2M model can largely reduce the time of production, and most importantly, cut the prices of commodities, thus meeting the demands of consumers in third-tier and lower-tier cities.

For instance, robot vacuums were usually priced at around 1,000 yuan ($144) and targeted at less than 10 million consumers, but the price can be reduced to about 300 under the C2M model that forces the upgrade of upstream industries, which will expand the target group to 100 million people.

According to a May report by Quest Mobile, the number of mobile internet users in third- and lower-tier cities has hit 618 million by March this year, indicating huge demographic dividend.