A mystery once, expo becomes big opportunity for manager

The Canton Fair was a mystery to He Li years ago, though she once lived in Guangzhou and was quite familiar with the host city of the trading event. Without knowledge of what the fair was about, she said she could still feel its enormous business opportunities as crowds of businesspeople from home and abroad flocked to the fair.

The mystery was solved when He led her team to visit the fair as general manager of Guizhou Miaoyao Biotechnology in 2017. The company from Guizhou province features modern application of herbal medicine of the Miao ethnic group, part of traditional Chinese medicine.

She had never dealt with a foreign businessman before her first visit to the fair, so she was stunned by the many foreigners at the fair and had no clue of what to do.

"All we could do was to learn from the start by observing, analyzing and trying to find a way for export," she recalled. Their efforts paid off, as one of the company's products, made from valerian, helped them out of the predicament.

Valerian is not strange to Europeans as they began to drink the herbal tea made of the plant for its calming effect in the 16th century.

Yet it was not easy to translate traditional medicinal theories into plain foreign language, she said.

At the fair, a British businessman and his agent from Hong Kong came to her company's exhibition booth. Yet with his nose in the air, the agent paid little attention to her introduction of the valerian product. Finally He gave him a few samples and asked him to try it out.

Because of the agent's attitude, He said she thought the company stood little change of securing an order from them. But later it turned out the agent contacted her for cooperation because he was satisfied with the product.

To date, her company has participated in five sessions of the fair in a row and its products have been exported to countries and regions in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. She credited the achievements to what they had learned from the fair.

The attendance of the fair enabled He to have a clear mind of where her company was going.