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A Look Inside China's Gargantuan Electronics Marketplace in Shenzhen
The city boasts "400 industrial design houses, 150,000 working industrial designers"
Shenzhen has been called the Silicon Valley of China. But as a manufacturing powerhouse we feel it's also the 1950s Detroit of China, just with electronics, not sedans, rolling off of assembly lines.
Shenzhen's staggering tech and production capacity has yielded the Huaqiangbei mega market, a sprawling, open-to-the-public marketplace that sells every conceivable type of electronics component. Parts can be bought in quantities of one to 100,000.
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Enter a caption (optional)If you knew what you were doing, you could stroll the aisles, buy every single component required to build an iPhone for under $100 and assemble one yourself.
Here maker movement proponent David Li, co-founder of the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, provides a tour of Huaqiangbei:
Simone Giertz also paid a visit, though unchaperoned:
Li's claim that Shenzhen is home to 400 industrial design firms employing 150,000 working industrial designers is staggering. While a chunk of those designers are probably occupied with copying the designs of others, Li did point out that at least two original products that proved to be global hits were conceived of in Shenzhen: The Selfie Stick and the wheeled hoverboard (though the tendency to explode has dampened enthusiasm for the latter). If we are going to see true design innovation from China in the coming years, chances are good that Shenzhen will be the epicenter.
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If not more than 5000 studios! 20 million people living and breathing product "design", manufacturing and selling domestic or overseas. One would expect much more innovation from such center if you ask me. But one is sure, if you are hardware startup you are already there. Good article!
That's incredible. In the video it sounds like he says 4000 design studios, not 400. I had a look around and found a few other articles confirming this, with one even saying 5000.