Guangdong toys ready for market abroad

While the domestic toy market has been flooded with a growing number of foreign brands offering cut-throat competition, the overseas market has opened its door widely to Guangdong's toy makers.

The province posted exports of toy-related products worth 118.78 billion yuan ($18.37 billion) in 2015, an increase of 5.89 percent from 2014.

Exports of traditional toys from the province were worth 66.66 billion yuan in 2015, rising by 13.9 percent from the previous year and making up 68.46 percent of the nation's total, according to customs statistics.

"Encouragingly, Guangdong's toy exports to the world's five continents all witnessed growth in 2015, a long-time-no-see tiding in the past decade," remarked Li Zhuoming, chairman of Guangdong Toy Association.

Citing statistics, he continued, the province's toy exports to other Asian markets grew 8.7 percent in 2015; Europe, 5 percent; Latin America, 10.1 percent; North America, 8.4 percent; and Africa, 21.4 percent.

Toy exports to the EU and the United States, which are the major toy consuming regions in the world, rose respectively by 7.7 percent and 9 percent.

The chairman attributed the export success to local toy makers' attempts to upgrade their products with the latest technologies, which enabled them to get a competitive advantage in the world's popular animation and cartoon series market.

Recoveries in the global market as a whole have also benefited toy-making businesses, he said.

Li expressed his optimism toward another export boom later this year, based on the fact that the China's toy exports still marked up a 3.5 percent growth in the first two months of this year against the drowsy export figure of the nation as a whole.

Li warned that toy makers whose business is primarily focused on the domestic market need to be especially vigilant as foreign toy makers seek to enter the national market to capitalize on China's recently instated "second-child" policy.

"This is evident from the surge of toy imports by 38.27 percent in 2015 and foreign toy makers' eager registration for a presence at the upcoming Guangzhou International Toy & Hobby Fair, to run from April 8 to 10 at Guangzhou Poly World Trade Expo Center," he said.

"So many toy enterprises from abroad have confirmed to show up; we've decided to set up an international exhibition hall to meet their demand," he said, citing suppliers from South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the US, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as examples.

The three-day toy industrial fair, an influential toy industrial expo in China, is considered the "weather vane of China's toy industry".

More than 1,000 toy makers will showcase their latest products and seek business opportunities at the fair.

Being China's major base for toy manufacturing, Guangdong raked in a gross industrial output of 137.24 billion yuan from the sector in 2015, accounting for 65.1 percent of the nation's total, official statistics show.