THE NANJINGER | VOLUME 13 ISSUE 01 | OCTOBER 2022
From B2B to B2C;
True Innovation Made in (Nanjing) China By Frank Hossack
Victor Du, MEI Awards Secretary General, with some of the products granted a MEI Award, at the Made-in-China.com headquarters in Nanjing’s Jiangbei New Area
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nnovation. That’s a word which in Nanjing is bantered around like baozi. But slapping the label “innovative” on something doesn’t make it so.
To find the genuine article, The Nanjinger first asks the question, what does Africa’s number 1 music APP, Boomplay, have in common with a bunch of students at Nanjing University of Science & Technology (NUST)? We’ll get to that. First, a little story about a Nanjing success story. We all know Alibaba and Amazon, but outside of the manufacturing and export sectors, few in the international community might be aware of Made-in-China.com. Dating back to 1998 and with over six million Registered Supplier Members, Made-in-China.com taps business opportunities for Chinese suppliers and overseas buyers, providing one-stop services for promoting international trade between the two sides. And it’s all proudly happening in Nanjing. But with so many suppliers, how is a buyer supposed to know which ones really do provide the top-quality products that they claim to and which the rest of the world demands?
Say hello to the Made-in-China.com initiative, the Manufacturing Excellence & Innovation Awards (MEI Awards). Initiated in 2011 in celebration of excellence in Chinese product manufacturing, the contest brings together the brightest of Chinese manufacturers in the launch of a series of outstanding products. These are then showcased at global events where Chinese manufacturers display their exemplary creations and share industry insights. All well and good. But here comes the innovative part, as was recently explained to The Nanjinger by Victor Du, MEI Awards Secretary General. Africa is now of course an emerging key market for Chinese manufacturers. And Africa has a lot of young people, somewhere now in the vicinity of 260 million in fact. And what do young people like? Music. Therein, in addition to the sales of albums and videos, merchandise (let’s be cool and call it the “merch”) makes up a sizeable portion of an artist’s income. And in order to bring in as many of those South African Rand or Nigerian Naira as possible, that means the merch must be of high quality.
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