(Yicai) Feb. 10 -- The number of foreign merchants visiting the Yiwu International Trade Market in China’s Yiwu, known as the world’s capital of small commodities, has increased despite US President Donald Trump’s introduction of 10 percent additional import tariffs.

Some 2,776 foreign sellers visited the Yiwu International Trade Market yesterday, the first business day of the market after the Chinese New Year holiday, up 5.2 percent from a year earlier, according to data from Zhejiang China Commodities City Group, the operator of the market. 

The opening rate of the Yiwu International Trade Market reached 95.1 percent yesterday, up from 94.6 percent a year earlier. Its total traffic was about 235,000 visitors, an increase of 3.1 percent in the period.

Trump signed an executive order imposing 10 percent additional tariffs on imports from China and 25 percent additional tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, effective Feb. 4, under the pretext of “halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into the US,” the White House announced on Feb. 1.

But US tariffs make little difference for Yiwu, Su Dongqing, president of the Yiwu Automobile and Motorcycle Accessories and Parts Industry Association, told Yicai.

Cross-border online stores raise prices according to tariffs, Su explained. Merchants in Yiwu sell products whose supply chains are well-established in China. As their competitors are also Chinese, they will all be impacted in the same way by the tariff hikes, so not much will change, Su noted.

Higher tariffs actually benefit high-innovation, high-profit products, a 3D-printed toy manufacturer said, adding that over 80 percent of the world’s 3D-printed toys are made in China, so customers will not have many other choices despite the tariffs.

“The new products we shipped last year through e-commerce sites were sold out on the first day, so this year’s batch would have been more expensive anyways,” the 3D toy maker said. “The impact of the tariffs is not so big.”

Profits at US resellers are also unlikely to be affected much by the new tariffs. A hardware merchant in Yiwu explained that her products were sold for CNY10 (USD1.37) to resellers, but customers in the US bought them for USD10, so there will still be room for profits despite the 10 percent additional tariffs.

Seventy percent of the hats that were previously exported to the US are now headed to Southeast Asia, so the US tariff hikes will not affect the industry, a hat merchant in Yiwu told Yicai.

Yiwu’s foreign trade value soared over 18 percent to CNY668.9 billion (USD91.6 billion) last year from the year before, with exports up 17.7 percent to CNY589 billion, accounting for 15 percent of the total of Zhejiang province. The number of foreign merchants visiting Yiwu last year climbed 55 percent to about 569,000.

Editor: Futura Costaglione