Xiao He wholesales PPE in Suzhou — gloves, masks, earplugs, safety shoes, all of it. In his first year in the business, he worked through a factory list from top to bottom, calling hard and closing plenty of orders, but at the end of the month, when he reconciled the books, most orders were small — a few dozen pairs of gloves, a few boxes of masks — barely enough to cover the gas money for delivery. Later he noticed that one of his regular customers, a factory with several hundred people, ordered more in a year than a long list of small factories combined. That's when it clicked: PPE consumption tracks headcount, so the customer list needs to be ranked by number of workers.
PPE Tracks Headcount: 70% of Insured Workers Are in Under 8% of Factories
How much PPE a factory uses depends on how many people are on the shop floor and how often items get replaced — building a customer list starts with figuring out which factories the workers are in.
I ran a total on Tianxia Gongchang of active manufacturing factories by insured headcount. 1,165,157 factories have recorded insured headcount, employing about 54.47 million insured workers combined. Broken down by factory size:
| Factory insured headcount | Insured workers (millions) | Share of all insured workers |
|---|---|---|
| 1-49 | 10.59 | 19.4% |
| 50-99 | 5.52 | 10.1% |
| 100+ | 38.35 | 70.4% |
(Figures are rounded to the nearest 10,000 workers and shares to one decimal place; the rows do not sum exactly to the total due to rounding.)
Factories with 100+ insured employees total 91,888, only 7.9% of factories with recorded insured headcount, yet they employ 70.4% of insured workers — an average of about 417 people per factory. The remaining 90-plus percent of factories together employ about 16.11 million insured workers, an average of about 15 people per factory.
For PPE sales, the same phone call or the same site visit gets you a factory with 400-plus people behind it on average, versus a dozen or so behind a small factory. If the list is spread evenly across factory count, your effort gets diluted across a huge number of small factories; if it's sorted by worker count, the first few pages are already your heaviest customers.
Why Factories Buy Every Year: One Law, One Set of Rules, One Standard
PPE is money a factory spends every year as a matter of routine, and it's backed by law:
- Article 45 of the Work Safety Law (2021 amendment): "A production or business operating entity must provide employees with labor protection equipment that meets national or industry standards, and must supervise and educate employees to wear and use it in accordance with the rules of use."
- Article 6 of the Administrative Rules on Employers' Labor Protection Equipment (issued by the General Office of the former State Administration of Work Safety on December 29, 2015, document Anjianzongting Anjian [2015] No. 124): "An employer shall allocate dedicated funds for equipping labor protection equipment, and may not substitute cash or other goods for it. This expenditure shall be included in production costs and recorded on an actual-incurred basis."
The two points in Article 6 that matter for sales: PPE can't be converted into cash or other goods and handed to workers, and the funding is earmarked separately and booked as a production cost. As long as the shop floor keeps roughly the same headcount, this purchase happens every single year.
What to equip and how is now covered by mandatory national standards. The Specifications for Personal Protective Equipment Selection (GB 39800 series) has 7 parts: Part 1, General Principles (GB 39800.1-2020), was published on December 24, 2020 and took effect January 1, 2022; Part 2 (petroleum, chemicals, natural gas), Part 3 (metallurgy, non-ferrous metals), and Part 4 (non-coal mining) had all taken effect by April 2024; Part 5 (building materials), Part 6 (electric power), and Part 7 (electronics) took effect January 1, 2025. According to the State Administration for Market Regulation, the standard set lists common work scenarios and hazard factors by industry, and it also specifies the recommended maximum replacement interval for personal protective equipment by job type.
The replacement interval is the consumption rhythm. When you visit the safety officer, bringing the relevant industry part of the standard to discuss position-by-position equipment lists and replacement cycles works far better than just quoting unit prices.
Higher-Risk Industries: About 12.79 Million Insured Workers, 75,000 Factories with 20+ Insured Employees
A group of factories has higher, broader PPE requirements: metallurgy, chemical, and building-materials workshops have high heat, dust, and chemicals; casting has molten metal; surface treatment has acid and alkali tanks; wood processing has wood dust. I pulled these 10 sub-industries on Tianxia Gongchang: they employ about 12.79 million insured workers combined, 23.5% of all insured workers, of which 75,274 factories have 20+ insured employees:
| Sub-industry | Factories with 20+ insured employees |
|---|---|
| Non-metallic mineral products (cement, glass, ceramics, etc.) | 29,611 |
| Chemical raw materials and chemical products | 21,923 |
| Non-ferrous metal smelting and rolling | 7,744 |
| Ferrous metal smelting and rolling | 4,885 |
| Ferrous metal casting | 4,262 |
| Metal surface treatment and heat treatment | 4,233 |
| Petroleum, coal, and other fuel processing | 2,079 |
| Non-ferrous metal casting | 1,882 |
| Man-made panels (wood-based panels) | 1,481 |
| Wood processing | 797 |
(A single factory may fall under two sub-industries at once, so the rows add up to more than 75,274.)
In this table, chemicals and petroleum processing map to GB 39800 Part 2, smelting maps to Part 3, and building materials like cement, glass, and ceramics map to Part 5. Purchase lists for these factories are usually longer than for an ordinary assembly workshop — beyond gloves and masks, there's dust protection, chemical protection, and heat protection as dedicated categories, which makes it worth building a separate product bundle per industry.
Ranking all industries by insured worker count (a single factory may belong to more than one industry, so the rows add up to more than the total): computers, communications, and other electronic equipment comes first at about 7.67 million; followed by general-purpose equipment at 5.87 million, metal products at 5.53 million, electrical machinery at 5.12 million, special-purpose equipment at 4.96 million, and automobiles at 4.46 million. GB 39800 Part 7 covers electronics specifically — the industry with the most insured workers now has a dedicated basis for position-by-position equipping as well.
Where the Workers Are: Re-Ranking Regions by Headcount
Provinces ranked by total insured workers (the factory-count column covers all active manufacturing factories in the region, including those with zero or unrecorded insured headcount):
| Province | Total insured workers (millions) | Factories |
|---|---|---|
| Guangdong | 10.65 | 405,519 |
| Jiangsu | 7.84 | 280,299 |
| Zhejiang | 6.31 | 350,022 |
| Shandong | 3.97 | 206,438 |
| Fujian | 2.24 | 79,939 |
| Hebei | 2.07 | 192,756 |
| Anhui | 2.03 | 83,151 |
| Sichuan | 2.01 | 74,308 |
Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shandong together account for about 28.77 million insured workers, 52.8% of the total. Two spots flip compared with ranking by factory count: Zhejiang has nearly 70,000 more factories than Jiangsu, yet about 1.53 million fewer insured workers; Hebei has 2.4 times as many factories as Fujian, yet fewer insured workers than Fujian.
Cities ranked the same way (factory-count basis as above):
| City | Total insured workers (millions) | Factories |
|---|---|---|
| Suzhou | 2.53 | 68,666 |
| Dongguan | 2.47 | 88,628 |
| Shenzhen | 1.96 | 58,726 |
| Shanghai | 1.5 | 37,784 |
| Ningbo | 1.29 | 69,160 |
| Foshan | 1.21 | 59,110 |
| Wuxi | 1.18 | 49,198 |
| Guangzhou | 1.11 | 38,951 |
| Chongqing | 1.09 | 38,379 |
| Chengdu | 0.94 | 26,819 |
Suzhou and Ningbo both have factory counts around 69,000, but Suzhou's insured workers are close to twice Ningbo's. Dongguan has about 20,000 more factories than Suzhou, yet slightly fewer insured workers. Whichever city you're in, screen out small factories by insured headcount first, then plan your visit route.
Four Things to Nail Down on the First Call
- How many people are actually on the shop floor: insured headcount is only a floor — dispatched and outsourced workers on the shop floor aren't included in a factory's own insured headcount; see the reasoning in How to Find Factory Customers for Labor Dispatch and Outsourcing from batch one. Ask "how many people are on the shop floor right now, and how many of them are dispatched or outsourced," and size the order to the actual on-the-job headcount.
- Who sets the PPE standard and who places the order: at large factories, the common split is that the safety department sets the equipment list, procurement chooses the supplier, and the shop floor draws items monthly; at small factories, the owner or factory manager usually decides alone. Map this chain first — see Methodology Lesson 6: Who Actually Decides in a Factory — Map the Decision Chain Before You Call.
- What list they issue against, and how often items get replaced: whether there's a position-by-position equipment list and replacement cycle. The list and cycle determine how much you can sell in a year; if they haven't worked this out yet, showing up with GB 39800 is itself a favor.
- How they buy now: annual tender, framework agreement, or ad hoc monthly purchases; how many current suppliers they have; and whether switching suppliers requires a trial period first, and how long.
A Sequence You Can Run Right Away
- Pick your cities first: choose by total insured workers. Suzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen together have about 6.96 million insured workers, 12.8% of the total.
- Pull the list: filter by region plus insured headcount on Tianxia Gongchang, starting with factories that have 100+ insured employees. For example, you can pull this list of Suzhou factories with 100+ insured employees directly. For factories under 100 insured employees, the owner usually handles PPE personally, so check "decision-maker contact details: yes" when filtering.
- Build a separate list for higher-risk industries: metallurgy, chemicals, building materials, casting, surface treatment, and wood processing have 20,983 factories with 100+ insured employees. You can pull this list and bring the matching equipment standard with you.
- Sort the list by insured headcount, highest to lowest: call the ones at the top first each day. See Methodology Lesson 3 for the ranking method: How to Build a "Call These Today" Factory List.
- Quote annual volume by position: once you have the on-the-job headcount, the equipment list, and the replacement cycle, quote the full-year volume by position, then negotiate unit price.
You can also just ask Tianxia Gongchang's AI something like "Suzhou electronics and metal-products factories with 100+ insured employees," and it will break the conditions into filters and list the factories.
Factories with 100+ insured employees are also customers for forklifts and calibration services — covered in two other articles: How to Find Factory Customers Selling Forklifts and Warehouse Handling Equipment and How to Find Factory Customers Selling Third-Party Calibration and Testing Services.
A Calculation You Can Do on the Spot
Take a factory from your list and use its insured headcount to estimate its annual PPE consumption. Take a factory with 300 insured employees as an example:
- Assume front-line workers are 80% of headcount, or 240 people;
- Assume each person goes through 4 pairs of gloves a month, so the annual total is 240 x 4 x 12 = 11,520 pairs;
- Assume 2 pairs of safety shoes per person per year, so the annual total is 240 x 2 = 480 pairs;
- Assume 1 mask per person per workday, and 250 workdays a year, so the annual total is 240 x 250 = 60,000 masks.
Apply the same assumptions to a factory with 15 insured employees (the average for factories under 100 insured employees) — 12 front-line workers — and the annual totals are 576 pairs of gloves, 24 pairs of safety shoes, and 3,000 masks, just one-twentieth the volume of the first factory.
Plug in your own unit prices and you get this factory's annual purchase value across these categories. Keep two things in mind: insured headcount is only a floor, and dispatched or outsourced workers on the shop floor need to be added on top; and higher-risk factories have longer category lists, which should be calculated separately from their own position-by-position equipment list.
→ Screen factories with 100+ insured employees in Suzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen on Tianxia Gongchang ｜ → Get a Tianxia Gongchang membership
Published by the Tianxia Gongchang Research Institute. Data notes: factory counts and insured headcount are from Tianxia Gongchang, covering manufacturing factories with active status, as of September 2026; a small number of clearly anomalous records were excluded when totaling insured headcount. Statutory provisions are from the Work Safety Law of the People's Republic of China (2021 amendment), made public via the Ministry of Emergency Management's website (July 2021); the Administrative Rules on Employers' Labor Protection Equipment is from a notice issued by the General Office of the former State Administration of Work Safety (Anjianzongting Anjian [2015] No. 124, December 2015), made public via the Ministry of Emergency Management's website (January 2016); the publication and effective dates of GB 39800.1-2020 are from the National Public Service Platform for Standards Information; the implementation status and content of the GB 39800 series parts are from the State Administration for Market Regulation (April 2024).