Great efforts made at Canton Fair to improve the quality while securing stability of foreign trade and maintain high-quality development

At the press conference of the 126th Canton Fair on October 14th, Xu Bing, the spokesperson and Deputy Director General of China Foreign Trade Centre introduces the measures taken to improve quality and stable growth of foreign trade.

Xu Bing said that since this year, China’s foreign trade faces complicated and severe external environment and increasing uncertainties and instabilities. Under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, the national business circle sticks to the overall principle of making progress while ensuring stability, focuses on improving quality while securing stability of foreign trade and facilitating its high-quality development as the missions, implements relevant policies and yields positive results.

Xu introduced that at the 126th session we will improve the quality and stable growth of foreign trade and promote its high-quality development by adopting a series of measures, including improving quality, exploring markets and optimizing services.

Stabilize scale. The exhibition area of this session totaled 1,185,000 square meters and there are 60,676 stands and 25,642 domestic and overseas exhibiting enterprises. Canton Fair is China’s largest platform for promoting foreign trade; the number of its stands is always in short supply for a long term. With a stable exhibition scale, Canton Fair makes it possible for domestic and foreign companies to share business opportunities, which is beneficial to assist Chinese enterprises and global buyers in stabilizing expectation and strengthening confidence.

Improve quality. The structure and quality of the exhibitors will be further optimized at this session and leading companies from various sectors continue to participate. With a modest increase, the number of brand enterprises reached 2,297 at this session. With the renewal rate of product exceeding 30%, there are more and more products with independent intellectual property rights, self-owned brand, independent marketing, high technological content, high added value and high benefits. The number of companies and products that applies for the 2019 CF Design Awards achieved a record high, up by 16.38% and 20.1% respectively over the last year. Therefore, Canton Fair plays an exemplary effect of “leading innovation, building standards”. There are 642 exhibitors in the International Pavilion. With many world famous leading enterprises and world industrial clusters participating in the exhibition, the quality has been improved steadily.

Optimize structure. Private enterprises are the major force of foreign trade. For the first 8 months of this year, the export of private enterprises accounts for 51.4%. Among the domestic exhibitors at this session, there are 1,268 state-owned enterprises, accounting for 5.07%; 2,339 foreign-funded enterprises, accounting for 9.36%; 21,393 private enterprises, taking up 85.57% of the total. Compared with last session, the proportion of private enterprises increased by 1.26 percentage points; private companies maintained the status of the largest exhibiting subject, bringing vitality to the development of the Canton Fair.

Explore market. Based on the promotion principle of “innovative, specialized, targeted, delicate” and focusing on countries along the route of “Belt & Road”, we invite global buyers to attend the exhibition and advance targeted invitation of important customers such as world’s top 250 retail enterprises and multinational sourcing enterprises. Through social media, Internet Promotion Campaign and other incentive programs, we invite more new buyers to attend the fair. It is predicted that buyers from over 210 countries and regions will attend this session, which is beneficial for Chinese companies to explore diversified international market and optimize the market mix.

Improve services. Based on improving the original exhibition services, we emphasize on building “smart Canton Fair”. Online-offline integration centered on 6 new business models—i-service, i-preshow, i-travel, i-matching, i-verification, i-promotion has taken shape and will be launched gradually. Through reshaping services we will improve customers’ attending experience. The Canton Fair office of Guangzhou exhibition centre customs has been officially put into use and the “door-to-door” service offered at the scene can enhance the convenience of customs clearance.

Reduce burden and enhance benefit. We will continue to charge booth fee according to the reduced level of the 119th session, cancel 23 service fees, and lay carpet for free. Also we will cancel booth fee for exhibitors from poor areas and provide supporting measures to assist them.

 (Canton Fair Press Centre)