Online shopping festival held to promote integration of Greater Bay Area

An exhibition for Hong Kong intangible cultural heritage is staged in a shopping mall in Shijiazhuang, north China's Hebei province, Sept. 13, 2021. (Photo by Chen Qibao/People's Daily Online)

The first online shopping festival of China's Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Greater Bay Area) has embraced a warm response from the market since it kicked off on Sept. 2.

It is bringing over 13 million products from 298,000 renowned brands and 800,000 merchants in the Greater Bay Area, closer to consumers.

Comprehensively demonstrating the innovation and vitality of local brands in the Greater Bay Area, the shopping festival promotes the integration of the region and further drives consumption upgrade.

The shopping festival is an excellent chance for time-honored brands in Guangdong, said an executive of a time-honored company based in Xinhui District, Jiangmen, south China's Guangdong province that produces chenpi, or sun-dried mandarin orange peel used as a traditional seasoning in Chinese cooking and traditional medicine. The executive believes that the shopping festival will introduce Xinhui's food culture to more consumers.

According to him, the sales volume of the company's chenpi stored for 5 to 15 years had surged 50 percent as of Sept. 6. "Through the online platform established by the shopping festival, Xinhui's chenpi is going out of the Greater Bay Area and welcomed by more consumers," he said.

The cultures of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao started from the same origin. The time-honored brands in these places, carrying the memories and nostalgia of generations of people, are inheritors of exquisite crafts forged through decades and even hundreds of years of practice.

Multiple time-honored brands in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao are present at the shopping festival, including Hong Kong MX Mooncakes, drug producer Ma Pak Leung, Kee Wah Bakery, Yeng Kee Bakery, Wingfai, and Guangdong's tea drink brand Wanglaoji.

Shiu Ka Fai, Hong Kong's Legislative Council member of Functional Constituency - Wholesale & Retail, noted that the shopping festival brings great products closer to consumers in the Greater Bay Area and promotes cultural exchanges. It benefits all the residents in the Greater Bay Area, he added.

According to statistics, five time-honored moon cake brands in the region, including MX Mooncakes, Wing Wah, Guangzhou Restaurant, and Wingfai, have sold a total of over 1.6 million items on Tmall, an online shopping platform of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, since the shopping festival commenced.

The Greater Bay Area has witnessed increasingly improving trade liberalization and facilitation of personnel and commodity exchanges. To buy cosmetics and snacks from the Chinese mainland on Chinese online shopping platforms is no longer something new for Hong Kong and Macao residents.

"This shopping festival, with a bunch of promotional activities and heavy discounts, helps me discover many featured products from the cities in the Greater Bay Area, and this is fascinating," said Macao citizen Li Huiyin who has spent thousands of yuan shopping online during the festival.

This shopping festival offered an opportunity for many time-honored brands in Hong Kong and Macao to enter the Chinese mainland market.

A week-long shopping festival for Macao products is held in Shanghai. Photo shows Shanghai citizens go shopping at the event, June 4, 2021. (Photo by Wang Chu/People's Daily Online)

Vivian Tang, executive director of Wai Yuen Tong, a traditional Chinese medicine manufacturer that boasts multiple production lines including patent drugs, tonics, and dietary supplements, told People's Daily that apart from the Greater Bay Area, Wai Yuen Tong's client bases are expanding in Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, too.

Multiple other time-honored brands in the Greater Bay Area, through online channels, especially the Greater Bay Area online shopping festival, are going into the broad Chinese mainland market. For instance, Ma Pak Leung opened a flagship store on Tmall last year. As of Sept. 10, the store's sales volume had increased by 160 percent from a year ago.

"I hope this shopping festival can mobilize more Hong Kong enterprises to upgrade their business mode and encourage more Hong Kong products to enter the cities in the Chinese mainland," said Wong Wai Hung, executive committee member of the Chinese Manufacturers' Association of Hong Kong. In March this year, the Chinese Manufacturers' Association of Hong Kong has launched an entrepreneuring campaign with multiple organizations to help Hong Kong enterprises expand the e-commerce market in the Chinese mainland through livestream marketing.

According to statistics, nearly 100 brands from Macao have launched their products during the shopping festival by Sept. 15, achieving a total turnover of nine million yuan ($1.39 million). Besides, over 20,000 Hong Kong brands showed up during the event, selling nearly 3.4 billion yuan of their products. The event has been joined by 1.07 million consumers from Hong Kong and Macao. They bought more than 4.18 million products, up 16 percent and 11 percent from a year ago, respectively.

The shopping festival is an opportunity for two-way exchanges of quality products. It drives new demands and further promotes the transformation and upgrading of businesses and industries in the Greater Bay Area with the digital economy. 

An exhibition for Hong Kong intangible cultural heritage is staged in a shopping mall in Shijiazhuang, north China's Hebei province, Sept. 13, 2021. (Photo by Chen Qibao/People's Daily Online)