Time-honored brands from Greater Bay Area embrace revival at shopping festival

The ongoing Greater Bay Area Shopping Festival has provided a platform for brands from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao region to display their high-quality products.

Commodities joining the online shopping festival of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. (People's Daily Online/Liu Jieyan)

The shopping festival, scheduled to run until Sept. 22, has about 298,000 brands on display from the region while offering more than 13 million items on Chinese online shopping platforms such as Taobao.

Hong Kong pharmaceutical brand Wai Yuen Tong saw its sales at around 50 shops in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) drop by 30 to 40 percent after COVID-19 hit. Tang Wai Man, executive director of Wai Yuen Tong Medicine Holdings, said customers from the mainland had no way to come to the shops in the SAR at the height of the pandemic. They could only hire middlemen to buy the products on their behalf, and still had to worry whether or not those products were fakes. “After we opened a store up on Tmall, consumers from the mainland could now enjoy free shopping,” she said.

As of now, two thirds of the company’s customers are from the Greater Bay Area, with the number of customers from Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing also growing.

The time-honored brands based in the Greater Bay Area are striving to grab a share of the market for younger consumers. With a history of nearly 200 years, Ma Pak Leung, a traditional Chinese medicine brand based in the SAR, launched healthcare products that included autumn pear grease and candies at its store on an e-commerce platform, with these products having now become increasingly popular among younger consumers.

Statistics indicated that since the festival kicked off, more than 1.6 million products from the Greater Bay Area have been sold on Tmall. “Some Hong Kong firms operating in the mainland are mainly export companies. As the consumer market in the mainland keeps expanding, some companies are thinking about shifting their focus to the mainland market,” said Wong Wai Hung, an executive committee member of the Chinese Manufacturers’ Association of Hong Kong, who expressed the hope that the shopping festival will make Hong Kong realize the importance of the mainland market.