The upcoming soccer World Cup in Qatar has boosted the sports economy development in China, by providing tremendous business opportunities for factory owners, broadcasting company China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Thursday (September 22).

Orders for products related to the event, which will be held from November 21 to December 18, continue to fly to businesses in Yiwu, East China’s Zhejiang province.

From June this year, orders for national flags for the World Cup participating countries have surged, with most orders coming from Panama, Argentina and the United States, said He Jinqi, a national flag maker in Yiwu.

Wu Di, an international trader whose customers are mainly from South America, has shipped four containers of World Cup products to clients in the first six months of this year.

The orders for World Cup-related products this year may increase 20 to 40 percent from the previous year, said Tong Guijuan, a businesswoman in Yiwu.

The popularity of the sales end has quickly spread to the production end and workers in many factories in Yiwu are working overtime to fulfil orders.

A toy manufacturing company got an order to assemble 45,000 toys in 25 days on September 2 to be shipped to Panama.

To finish the work on time, the company added two more workers to the production line, said Jiang Jielun, manager of the toy manufacturer. 

Goods to be shipped to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and the United States are piled up in the factory’s 1,000-square-meter warehouse. They need to be shipped in early October to meet the demand of the hot sales season.

The orders are full, the factory is operating at full load and two or three vehicles of products are delivered per day, said Lei Hengchun, the head of a toy company in Yiwu.

In another factory 200,000 to 300,000 footballs are ready to be delivered after over one month’s production, said Wu Xiaoming, a manager of a sports goods company.

Although the international orders are nearly coming to an end, they have extended their production plans to early next year as the World Cup sports craze is expected to last for a long time, Wu said

Yiwu, the world’s largest distribution centre for Christmas products, reopened on August 21, 10 days after COVID-19 restrictions went into effect. The high sales of World Cup products have boosted the sports economy not only due to chartered flights and new logistics channels but also because of the resilience of the Chinese economy.