Spring trade fair season – Part 1 – Canton Fair

April is a very busy trade show period here in the Fair East. And thanks to the nature of the BizGift industry most of these trade shows are important for us. This mini series of posts will introduce those most significant ones.

By far the biggest show that takes part in this region is the China Import and Export Fair, better known as Canton Fair. It is held twice a year (in April and in October) and the next one will be its 103rd edition. With the shift of the manufacturing from developed countries to China this fair is perhaps one of the most important fairs these days. That however by no means means it is also one of the best. Far from that …

The fair is currently held in 2 phases (different products) with 5 days gap between them. Each phase is split into 2 venues – the old one and the new one. These two venues are located at the opposite ends the of the huge, traffic jammed and incredibly polluted city of Guangzhou.

The fair itself, despite some efforts from the organizers, is quite a mess. It is rare to actually find a booth where the name on the booth is the same as the companies inside the booth. The booths themselves are commodity. Many companies do not exhibit, they simply get the booth, carve into three (one wall for one exhibitor) and sell it on for 5-10 times the original cost. This brings 2-3 total strangers into one booth, each of them with different product line that often does not even belong to that particular hall or even that particular fair.

The other popular feature of Canton Fair is hundreds of exhibitors displaying exactly the same thing, in exactly the same packaging, with same item number on the package. Hundreds of exporters trying to sell the same product from the same factory. One consequence is that you walk and walk until you drop dead but you always see the same stuff. The same stuff however does not have the same price. I had an experience that in 5 booths next to each other people were offering me exactly the same thing from 0.50 to 1.60

The biggest problem with the Canton Fair is the number of exhibitors whose only purpose is to cheat and take advantage. They are not a majority, but there are many of them. One has to exercise great caution. Often the information given by the exhibitors is not accurate, often it is not backed up by anything, often it is an outright lie. Many people who visit the fair for the first time get carried away by the sheer size of the fair, the variety of products and the prices (if compared with prices they pay to their local suppliers, importers). Simple advice here – when something looks to good to be true, it usually is not true.

My recommendation for new visitors would be – go around, get the information, contacts, ideas, but do not waste too much time discussing things. Get back to the suppliers after the fair, get things from them black and white in writing and move on from there.

The food in the venues is mostly crap, the coffee is bad and overpriced and the beer is often either warm or rock solid frozen . But to be fair to the organizers there are obvious efforts to improve the show. I was quite surprised when I received a questionnaire with a survey on planned changes to fair from next year mostly to do with planned expansion of the fair.

What would I change about this fair:

• I would absolutely prohibit reselling of the booth space and enforce that regulation

• I would screen the exhibitors before accepting them to make sure the con artists do not make it there (this would mean much less exhibitors but much better quality, saving space, saving time)

• I would take the fact that 95% percent of visitors are overseas people into consideration when it comes to food and drinks at the fair.

Perhaps one day that may happen. For the near future however the plans are to expand this fair and split it into 3 parts instead of 2 and that does not sound like a good idea at all …

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