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| Aerial view of the Dragon Mart Shopping Centre, Dubai |
Dragon Mart provides an insight into a different world. It is a mall that is 1.2km long and contains 3,950 shops. Both
the shops that fill the mall and the products that fill the shops
do not bear US and European familiar brand names as most of the world's shopping malls do. Dragonmart is dedicated to efficiency and cheapness. The China Ocean
Shipping Company (COSCO) has a huge logistics centre next to the mall
allowing new goods to be brought straight off the ship from China and
wholesale purchases to be exported anywhere in the world.
Who are the customers and what are they buying?
To a large extent, the
customers are wholesalers and bargain-hunting migrant workers in Dubai. The bargains are attractive, for example, a digital camera for 99 dirhams ($27) or a treadmill for
700 ($190) dirhams.The Dragon Mart may not be everyone's cup of tea, that is, not everyone may be attracted to polyester Persian carpets or plastic executive
desks. Many companies specialise in
producing cheap imitations of popular US and European brands. Yet Dragon Mart (and its Chinese manufacturers) cannot be dismissed. Dragon Mart
caters for what many believe is the world’s most exciting group of consumers, the
emerging middle class. The Consultancy Mckinsey estimates that this group could include 2bn people who spend $6.9 trillion a year.
These people cannot afford to shop buying expensive branded US and European products, yet
they too are seeking the status symbols of middle-class life. For them, many of the
goods displayed represent the dream of upward mobility. The below video shows some of the products on offer at the Dubai Dragon Mart.
Dubai Dragon Mart is also evidence of the rebirth of one of the world’s
oldest trading routes, the silk road. The old silk road specialised
in luxuries like silk. The new silk road specialises in everything, interestingly with a stress on plastic. Furthermore, Dubai boasts two of the most
important transport hubs on this road: the world’s ninth-biggest container
port and one of its busiest airports. The rebirth of the new silk route will increasingly branch out to the emerging economies of the world by sea and air bringing affordable consumer goods to the new emerging middle classes in the Américas and Africa.
