When discussing India’s toy exports to 153 countries and Vietnam’s hardware industry exceeding US$2 billion, a core question emerged: Can these two countries replicate Yiwu’s “world supermarket” with 2.1 million products and 75,000 stalls to achieve one-stop purchasing?
The answer is: absolutely impossible in the short term.
India and Vietnam can be substitutes for Yiwu in specific categories, but they cannot be substitutes for its model.
To understand this, we need to conduct a horizontal benchmark between Yiwu and India and Vietnam to find out the most critical systemic difference.
The choice of India and Vietnam as reference is not arbitrary.
They constitute the most direct competitive relationship with Yiwu in the “alternative” narrative of the global small commodity supply chain.
Relying on the “Made in India” strategy, India has rapidly emerged in labor-intensive industries such as toys. In 2025, toy exports will reach US$186 million, covering 153 countries.
The logic is to rely on lower labor costs (about 1/3 of China’s) to undertake industrial transfers.
Relying on a series of free trade agreements, Vietnam has become a popular node for the transfer of global supply chains. Its hardware tools market size is expected to exceed US$2.5 billion in 2025.
Its advantages lie in policy convenience and location.
The “comparability” between them and Yiwu is that they are both trying to get a share of the global small commodity trade, and they all have certain cost or policy advantages.
However, it is this similar starting point that makes the huge differences in results all the more critical.
The core moat of Yiwu is far from a pile of goods, but a highly complex business ecosystem composed of four pillars: industrial agglomeration, institutional innovation, digital ecology and infrastructure.
In terms of industrial agglomeration, within 50 kilometers around Yiwu, the entire chain from raw materials and parts to production equipment and workers can be equipped to achieve the ultimate speed of “viewing samples in the morning, making samples in the afternoon, and putting them on shelves the next day.”
This is not a market, but a giant industrial network driven by market demand.
In terms of institutional innovation, the state’s market procurement trade method (1039 model) tailored for the fragmented trade of small commodities has shortened the customs declaration of LCL goods from days to minutes, and solved the compliance problems of “invoice-free tax exemption” and foreign exchange collection and settlement for small and medium-sized merchants.
In 2025, this model’s export volume will account for 70.7% of the country’s total.
In terms of digital drive, AI translation tools enable real-time translation into 40 languages, reducing cross-border order negotiation time from half a month to 30 minutes; AR real-life factory visits allow buyers to remotely inspect goods; the Chinagoods platform links more than 5.7 million global buyers.
In terms of infrastructure, by building a multimodal transport network such as the “Yi-Xin-Europe” train and sea-rail combined transport, the logistics cost is only 1/3 of that in India, and the export cost of a container is US$500 lower than that in India.
Comparing Yiwu’s systemic advantages with the current situation in India and Vietnam, the most critical variable emerges clearly: they lack the depth and breadth to upgrade “trade nodes” to “industrial ecology.”
In terms of category width, Yiwu covers 2.1 million types of products, ranging from needles and threads to photovoltaic modules.
This is the width that has naturally grown out of 40 years of market competition.
However, India has only developed scale in a few categories such as toys; Vietnam is outstanding in categories such as hardware and textiles.
Their product categories are “less than a fraction of Yiwu’s” and cannot provide one-stop purchasing solutions.
In terms of the depth of the supply chain, Yiwu has linked more than 2.1 million manufacturing companies behind it, forming a deep binding of “front stores and back factories”, with complete capabilities from R&D to manufacturing.
India and Vietnam have weak industrial supporting facilities.
Vietnam’s textile industry relies on imports of 80% of fabrics from China; India relies on imports of 89.3% of mobile phone components.
They play more of an assembly role of “import-processing-export”, and the supply chain is not deeply rooted.
In terms of systems, Yiwu has gone from “four permissions” to “market procurement” and has continued more than 40 national-level reform pilots for more than 40 years, taking the initiative to “test the system for the country.”
The policies of India and Vietnam are mostly tax incentives to attract foreign investment (such as Vietnam’s 10% preferential tax rate for high-tech projects) or trade agreement facilitation, and lack systematic institutional design to address the complexity of small commodity trade.
In terms of digital ecology, Yiwu’s 800,000 e-commerce entities have digitally integrated into the entire transaction process, forming a new model of “cross-border live broadcast + supply chain + localized services”.
India and Vietnam have a low degree of digitalization, and trade is still dominated by traditional offline and OEM models, failing to achieve an efficient digital closed loop of demand and manufacturing.
This benchmark also reveals the inherent limitations of the India-Vietnam model. These are gaps that are difficult to bridge in the short term.
In terms of infrastructure, India’s port customs clearance efficiency is only one-third that of China’s, and the aging power grid has led to frequent nationwide power outages. Vietnam has 564 major infrastructure projects under catch-up construction, and port congestion is serious.
These directly drive up comprehensive logistics and production costs.
In terms of industrial ecology, Yiwu’s ecology is the result of the consistent 40-year strategy of “Building Business and Building a City” and is a network spontaneously formed by countless small and medium-sized merchants in market competition.
This complex network based on trust and efficiency cannot be built in a short time through government planning or foreign investment.
In terms of talents and local enterprises, the labor productivity of local enterprises in Vietnam is 70% lower than that of foreign-invested enterprises, and there is a serious shortage of high-quality technical talents.
This results in its industrial upgrading being highly dependent on foreign investment, making it difficult to endogenously evolve a vibrant cluster of small, medium and micro enterprises like Yiwu.
Through this horizontal benchmarking, we can gain a clearer understanding of the current global supply chain landscape.
India and Vietnam will not be able to replicate Yiwu’s one-stop purchasing ecology in 5-10 years.
They are more suitable to be complements in specific categories and specific links in the global supply chain, rather than disruptors.
Experts predict that it will take at least 20 to 30 years of continuous investment to approach Yiwu’s current level.
The single advantage of low labor costs can easily be offset by inefficient logistics and unstable energy supply.
Yiwu has proven that its comprehensive cost advantages based on efficient supply chains, innovative systems and improved infrastructure are unshakable competitiveness.
The Yiwu model is the product of China’s complete industrial system, continuous institutional innovation and the development of the digital economy to a certain stage.
It reveals China’s deep advantages as the “world’s factory”, which have shifted from early labor dividends to systemic dividends from industrial chain synergy efficiency, innovation ecology and infrastructure networks.
Therefore, when we ask “Can India and Vietnam catch up with Yiwu?”, we are essentially exploring whether a latecomer country can systematically replicate a complex business ecosystem that has gone through long-term market evolution and collaborative innovation between government and enterprises in a short period of time.
The answer is obviously no.
The difficulty of copying Yiwu just proves the depth and value of its model.
