Every electronics market in Asia, counted the same way

How each city is recorded

By city

By country

A further 62 shops in the same extract carry no country code. The state polygon that would name them is cut by the edge of the extract, so nothing on the map says where they are. They are counted here and assigned nowhere: an edge of an extract is not filled in by judgement.

This table does not measure how big a market is. It measures what OpenStreetMap holds. Look at the street column: in Dubai 78% of shops state their own street, in Shenzhen 11%. Dubai is mapped shop by shop, Shenzhen building by building — which is why a city with hundreds of counters inside a single tower can show a smaller number than a district of shopfronts. One instrument, one day, and what it reveals is a difference in recording, not in trade.

City boundaries are not numbered the same way from one country to the next. The boundary used is named for each city, so that nothing is compared across levels without saying so.

An enclosure is a named polygon — building, mall or marketplace — containing at least two of the counted shops; where polygons overlap, the smallest one wins, so no shop belongs to more than one enclosure.

Singapore stands apart there: 46% of its shops sit inside a named enclosure, against 8 to 11% elsewhere. Two explanations produce that figure and this data cannot separate them — Singaporean electronics retail may genuinely happen inside malls, or Singaporean malls may simply be mapped shop by shop. It would take a source outside OpenStreetMap to say which.

Every row here depends on a boundary that closes. Where a boundary's members run past the edge of the data extract, the shape does not assemble and the place cannot be counted — so a missing row means a cut boundary, never an absence of shops.

Measured or looked for, and not in the table above:

• Kaohsiung — the boundary relation exists at level 4 with 286 members, but part of it lies outside the extract, so no surface assembles. It is the only major municipality of Taiwan missing from the 156 level-4 shapes that did assemble.
• Zhongli — measured at 36 shops, 13 of them declaring a street, but its boundary is a district at level 7. Set beside level-4 municipalities it would compare two different things, so it stays out of the table rather than out of the record.

Places measured so far: 12. The others are being counted with the same method.

The market cities

Networks and services