Wang Yu shivers in his newspaper kiosk, clutches a flask of green tea and laughs at how the necklines on the beautiful women smiling from the hundreds of magazine covers that surround him seem to plunge deeper each year. He's been in the media business for more than 20 years but says what he sells now bears little comparison to his early-day wares.
'I used to just sell the government papers,' he said, pointing to a small selection of thin, drab-looking papers all leading with photographs of national leaders. But these days his small kiosk is an explosion of colour and beauty, a testament to the vibrant state of the magazine industry. 'There are thousands of them. I can't keep count, and hundreds go bust each year,' he said.
Indeed, the mainland's magazine market is a very cluttered space, with more than 9,000 titles. But Wu Hong of the Trends magazine group is one of those who still sees lots of room for growth. The mainland publisher of Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire and more than a dozen other magazines, feels he can fit plenty more into the kiosks run by the likes of Mr Wang.
The Suzhou native set up the company 12 years ago after he had worked as a journalist for more than a decade for one of the tourism board's publications. The relationships he cultivated with his bosses at that stage were key to his future success: they handed him the deeply coveted publishing licence that allowed him to strike deals with the likes of the American Hearst publications and National Geographic, to introduce their material to China. Alongside the international names, he introduced a host of specialist homegrown consumer titles, such as Trends Home and Trends Health, and is in the process of launching a magazine for food and wine connoisseurs and another for art collectors.
'Our titles cover every main aspect of consumer life,' he said, giving the mainland's estimated 200 million members of the rapidly growing middle class lots of advice on how to spend their new-found wealth.
While the competition is tough, he estimates his company controls about 20 per cent of the magazine market, 'and we intend to double revenue over the next three years', he says. Trends is helped by the fact that advertisers on the mainland tend to stick with the big names: an estimated 30 per cent of all ad revenue goes to the top 10 titles.