The Shenzhen Electronic Market is world famous, and rightly so. Spread across at least 12 buildings within a couple blocks, it is a gigantic mecca for all things electronic. Imagine roughly 4 blocks of buildings; they’re all banks and office buildings that are very tall, but the first 3-6 floors are part of the electronics market. On the first floor of each building is bare components. Any component you can think of. There are booths for enclosures, SMD parts, DIP parts, booths that specialize in relays or motors or power supplies. There are connectors booths and LED booths. There are booths for assembly tools like solder irons, multimeters, solder, wire, etc. Some of the booths are full of reclaimed parts, with solder still visible on leads and people in the process of reclaiming parts. Some of the booths are fronts for much larger companies, and their displays hide the fact that they have factories and large distribution chains behind them. Many of the booths are filled to the brim with bags of components or reels. Along the outer edge of the market are larger shops full of reels, and often these larger shops will supply to the booths. One could go up to any booth and start asking for components, and if they don’t have them, they know who will and will have a runner go get it.
The second floor is usually more of the same. Sometimes they have more advanced or specialized components. One building had a second floor composed entirely of laptop parts; screens, motherboards, batteries, keyboards. A different building had a second floor full of microprocessors. On the rest of the floors is consumer electronics. There are booths for individual brands, or booths that have a variety. If you think of the exhibit floor of a conference, it’s much like that. Brand booths are nicer and larger and have staff in matching shirts. In one of the buildings the whole 6th floor was dedicated to LED signs and manufacturers.
It’s easy to get lost in the buildings and wander around for hours, and after a while it becomes apparent that they’re all hawking very similar, if not the same, stuff. I don’t know how many booths I passed that had the same connector components displayed, or the multitude of booths dedicated to showing the same LED flashlights and light bulbs.
Click an image to make it big:
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- One of the hundreds of booth stacked with reels of components.
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- Most of these buildings are filled with electronics components and consumer electronics and offices of people who deal in electronics.
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- A couple people sorting and counting parts at their booth.
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- Each floor is filled with small booths.
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- A typical view of the first floor of each building. Booth after booth.
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- The entrance to the LED floor.
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- Some of the LED offerings. Sign boards about the size of my scoreboard, but with an LED matrix instead of segments, were costing about the same as my scoreboard will sell for. They're completely different products, though.
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- On the LED floor of one building was a company that made manufacturing machines. This one takes bags of LEDs, and puts them on a line in the right order where they then get fed through a pick and place machine.
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- The lady had a home-made board to use to demonstrate the functioning of the various radio transmitters and receivers.
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- A booth full of enclosures. These were the offerings from a catalog that the nice lady was pushing on me.
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- Most booths had glass display cases with the components they were offering. This case shows mostly relays, with some USB connectors.
