On September 28th, 2021 Zhejiang International Trade (Dubai) Exhibition sponsored by Zhejiang Provincial Department of Commerce was successfully opened in Dubai World Trade Center. On the afternoon of the 28th, the opening ceremony and online tour of this exhibition was held in Hangzhou. Han Jie, deputy director of Zhejiang Provincial Department of Commerce and first-class inspector, Zhou Guanchao, deputy commissioner of the Commissioner’s Office of the Ministry of Commerce in Hangzhou, and heads of relevant departments and units of the department were present.
With the spread of the epidemic, the international movement was blocked, and the overseas exhibition basically stopped. At the beginning of last year, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Commerce set a precedent by creating the “one country, one product, one exhibition” Zhejiang export online trade fair. After overcoming the difficulties of people flow and logistics constraints, Zhejiang gave full play to the new advantages of Zhejiang’s digital economy and adopted the form of “offline entity display+online instant negotiation” to hold overseas self-organized exhibitions. On-site exhibitions retain all the elements of offline exhibitions, and effectively make up for the restrictions of exhibitors’ overseas exhibitions. At the same time, they fully guarantee the demand of on-site buyers for “seeing”, “touching” and “talking well”.
In his speech, Han Jie said that due to the COVID-19 epidemic, international exhibitions around the world have pressed the pause button, but the trade between China and UAE has not stopped. The offline restart of Dubai exhibition has greatly encouraged Zhejiang foreign traders. Zhejiang hardware products have always been favored by the Middle East market. Dubai Exhibition was chosen as the first exhibition of Zhejiang’s overseas self-organized exhibition in 2021, which is intended to give full play to Dubai’s role as a bridge radiating the Middle East market and create more opportunities for “quality Zhejiang products to be sold in the Middle East” in the post-epidemic era. According to statistics, from January to July this year, our province exported 147.52 billion yuan to the Middle East market, up 8.1% year-on-year.
A total of 45 enterprises from all over the province participated in this exhibition. The exhibits involved hardware tools and labor insurance products, with a net exhibition area of 450 square meters. Dubai has always been a transportation center, information center, exhibition center and commodity distribution center in the Middle East and Africa due to its open economic policy and good geographical location. At the exhibition site, it can be seen that offline physical exhibitions have been running normally in Dubai. Booths are set up as usual, samples are shipped out normally, exhibitors are located in China, and the network is connected wirelessly. The new mode is “Quality Zhejiang Goods” going out to solve problems, which inspires new enthusiasm of enterprises to participate in the exhibition and wins high praise from enterprises and all walks of life. Through this exhibition, we will seize new opportunities for foreign trade enterprises in our province to explore the Middle East market under the severe epidemic situation, and increase confidence for enterprises to “go global”.
(Contributed by Foreign Trade Development Office)