(Yicai Global) March 24 -- Warehouses in Yiwu, China's production hub of small commodities, are emptying out as the county's international trade picks up.

Inventory at Yiwu O-Choice Import and Export, a leading supplier of silks and pillowcases, has fallen from several thousand pieces last year to only a few hundred after exports jumped between 30 percent and 40 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, Liu Ming Yang, the firm's general manager, told Yicai Global recently.

“A European customer who visited Yiwu O-Choice this month said he had miscalculated the speed of the market recovery and had sold all of the goods he had bought last year,” Liu noted. “He asked us to deliver a new batch of products ahead of schedule and shorten the delivery time to 20 days from 45 days.”

China's foreign trade exited four straight months of decline in February, rising 1.3 percent to USD411.2 billion from a year earlier, according to customs data. Imports climbed 4.2 percent, while exports sank 1.3 percent, a much smaller decline than in the previous three months.

Amid the digitalization wave, newly emergent live broadcast e-commerce has also penetrated the field, bolstering the trade recovery.

Cross-border livestream marketing has turbocharged orders from overseas customers, according to Lai Guorong, general manager of Chinese sportswear maker Zhejiang Aidu Garments. The firm attracted more than 10 new clients from Europe, the United States, Japan, and the Middle East this year thanks to the new approach, he added.

The number of traders doing livestream marketing on Chinese cross-border e-commerce platform Alibaba had doubled as of March 7 from a year earlier, with overseas viewers surging four-fold, the latest data from e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding showed.

Overseas customers have become more accustomed to shopping on e-commerce platforms versus the traditional large-scale wholesale models, which aligns with China's digital transformation, Yiwu O-Choice ’s Liu noted.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Martin Kadiev