Shenzhen City is located in the southern of the Guangdong Province, just a train ride from Hong Kong. It is a is a fast growing city there are many interesting places to visit. But one of the interesting places to visit is spending some time in the vast electronics market in downtown Shenzhen like in SEG Electronic Market.

The moment I step in I was stunned by a massive display of electronic components. Tapes of resistors and capacitors, LEDs, ICs of every type, inductors, relays, voltmeters, trays of memory card, all crammed into tiny six-by-three foot booths with a sales person playing at their laptop, sometimes chatting, and browsing website. Some booths are true family business, with women tending to babies and kids playing in the aisles. I never saw anything like that.  People are constantly eating, chatting, smoking, talking on their phones, playing video games, watching streaming videos, watching DVDs, humming, napping, and working.

I was told that in Shenzhen Electronics market you can buy almost any electronic component and computer parts from any brand like Sony, Samsung, LG. If you spend RMB10,000 to buy the electronic component here you can save one air ticket return Kuala Lumpur and have extra money to spend here compare to if you buy the quantity in Kuala Lumpur. Mind you their electronic stocks also come from here.

Inside Electronics Market

I wonder with so many vendors how they survive the competition. A small booth with the glass cabinet where some stuffs are displayed, and each booth you will see a sales person with lap top. Most of the booths are run by a particular distributor or factory, and what’s behind the counter are (more often than not) small quantities intended as commercial samples. This LED vendor, for example, only has a few of each type of display. If you need more than the display stuff they’ll often send a runner to pick them up from another booth or storage location.

After chatting with one of the vendor while waiting for the stock to arrive, he says they represent factory or agency and have their regular customer who buy in large quantity and they will use online messenger to chat and do all the transaction over the internet. If the prices and quantity is agreeable then the sale is done. The seller will pack and courier the electronic component to their customer. Payment is via paypal, western union or bank transfer. It is that easy. No wonder they are many electronic store here in Shenzhen but they can still survive. All they need is laptop, internet, and payment gateway and build their regular customer over the months. Some time they advertise in Ali Baba website the most popular buyer and sellers online in China.

Market is big and price is cheap and stock is plenty. The only things we have to be careful is to beware of the cheating and imitation. If you buy in bulk or large quantity then be prepare to have at least 20% of them faulty and not functioning. Then the transportation to bring back to Malaysia is quite troublesome. Unless you have the freight forwarding to arrange to bring back then don’t buy many.