Small and midsized businesses are buying more on China’s Cogobuy.com business-to-business marketplace for electronics products, providing the main driver of a 62.9% year-over-year increase in gross merchandise value transacted on the site in the first quarter, to 2.49 billion yuan ($US402.02 million), Hong Kong-based Cogobuy Group says.

Cogobuy says its own direct sales to businesses accounted for 76.1% of the purchases on the web marketplace in the quarter, with outside sellers accounting for 16.3%.  The balance came from its supply chain financing business.

The e-commerce company says 52% of transaction value was from large “blue chip” companies, with the remaining 48% from small and midsize businesses. It also notes that a surge in new transacting customers in the first quarter—to 6,017, up 91.6% from 3,141 a year earlier—came mostly from small and midsized businesses, which accounted for 97.8% of Cogobuy’s transacting customers—those who purchase from its base of some 500 suppliers—at the end of the quarter. It said its number of registered customers in the quarter increased 62.9% to 35,682 from 21,903 a year earlier.

Cogobuy sells about 50,000 electronics components from some 500 Chinese suppliers to mostly small and midsize manufacturing companies based in China.

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