Canton Fair strives to diversify buyer origin in a high quality manner

At the opening press conference of the 125th Canton Fair on April 14, Xu Bing, spokesman for Canton Fair and Deputy Director General of China Foreign Trade Centre, said that taking into account of various factors, buyer attendance of the current session faces certain pressure.

Xu Bing said that according to custom statistics, in the first quarter of this year, the total value of China's import and export was 7.01 trillion yuan, with an increase of 3.7% over the same period of last year. The total value of export was 3.77 trillion yuan, with an increase of 6.7%. And the total value of China's import was 3.24 trillion yuan, with an increase of 0.3%. While the scale of import and export has maintained growth, the international market layout has been further optimized, and the quality and efficiency of development have been further enhanced.

At the same time, despite that China's foreign trade are overall stable in the first quarter, the growth rate is relatively low. And China's foreign trade development is facing a rather severe and complex environment; so the task of stabilizing foreign trade is arduous. From an international perspective, global economic growth faces resistance, with protectionism and anti globalization on the rise, and multilateral trading system faces many challenges, posing threat to the steady growth of global trade. According to the “Global World Trade Outlook Indicator Report” released by the World Trade Organization, the world trade outlook indicator fell to 96.3 in the first quarter of 2019, with a decline of 2.3 percentage points over the previous quarter, reaching a 9-year low since the March of 2010. The Baltic Dry Index, which is a weathervane for global trade, has fallen steadily this year, by about 50% by mid-March. In the "Global Trade Data and Outlook" released by the World Trade Organization on April 2nd, the global trade growth forecast for this year was significantly reduced to 2.6% from the previous 3.7%. From a domestic prospective, with increased downward pressure, the real economy faces many difficulties，and the financing difficulty and high cost for enterprises have not been effectively alleviated. The cost of labor, land and other factors has risen, and some import and export enterprises face many difficulties in their operation and development.

Xu Bing said that facing the complicated foreign trade situation, the current Canton Fair will implement the requirement of “promote steady and quality growth of foreign trade, and diversify export markets”, adhere to the marketing concept of “innovation, specialization, targeted and delicate”, and carry out global promotion in a targeted fashion according to the principle of combining specialized exhibition sections and target markets. Canton Fair strives to attract buyers from "Belt and Road" countries, key markets, and world's top 250 retailers and new buyers, improve the quality of buyers, achieve diversification and globalization of buyer origin, and there will be buyers from over 210 countries and regions.

Xu said that based on the current situation, important holidays in some countries coincide with this session. At the same time, some indicators related to buyers' attendance, such as the number of overseas buyers' invitation application, pre-registration, Canton Fair Call Center consultation, hotel reservation rate, airline reservation rate, and ticket booking rate of Guangzhou-Kowloon railway, all reflect that buyer attendance of this session is affected by the international macro environment, and the situation is rather grim.

(Canton Fair Press Center)