Canton Fair set to conclude as online debut creates new chances

A view of the China Import and Export Fair Complex in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong province, on June 14. (Photo/China Daily)

The 127th China Import and Export Fair, also known as the Canton Fair will conclude on Wednesday.

The 10-day event has featured sellers and buyers shifting their business from the exhibition hall to online, with nearly 26,000 domestic and foreign enterprises doing livestreaming to promote their businesses.

The traditional mode of showing products at an exhibition hall will provide a more intuitive and three-dimensional feeling about products, and face-to-face meetings are more in-depth between vendors and purchasers, while the online exhibition can provide new products and new business opportunities, said Vladimir Eremin, general manager of EL-Delta Trading Company Ltd, as quoted in a report by comnews.com.

Traditional merchants need some time to be familiar with and operate in the online fair, said Eremin, and he wanted the online fair mode to become a normal practice, instead of just lasting 10 days.

Shifting the fair online has also brought opportunities to exhibitors. By livestreaming, an import and export firm in Chongqing attracted an audience of nearly 100,000 people in three days, and obtained orders of intent from Morocco, Netherlands and Spain.

Moreover, the Canton Fair continues to help enterprises in China's poor regions to take advantage of the global market.

This year, the number of exhibitors from poor regions increased 62.3 percent year-on-year, driven by a series of new measures including fully open applications and encouraging people to join the fair, with no exhibition charge, help to attract online audiences, as well as training people in online sales skills.

The fair has provided a platform to enterprises from poor regions to show their products online to global purchasing agents, instead of bringing products to the exhibition hall, saving a lot of manpower and material resources, said an employee from a fruit juice company in Tianshui, Northwest China's Gansu province.

Signing contracts online not only brings orders to Chinese and foreign enterprises, but also opens up new channels for international economic and trade cooperation, said the Economic Daily.