China’s global trade bazaar is going online to survive

The world’s largest trade fair is going online, and the salespeople of Ningbo MH Industry Co have been drafted in to a live-streaming boot camp.

Carefully selected for English skills and winning personality, a few dozen budding influencers from the east coast textile firm are being drilled to undergo an experiment unprecedented in the history of the Canton Fair. The twice-yearly trade meeting in the southern megacity of Guangzhou usually sees more than 200,000 foreign buyers cram into its exhibition halls, but this year the coronavirus pandemic has made that impossible.

Instead, the government has hired Tencent Holdings to lay out a massive online live stream architecture to enable the same sort of interaction without the physical presence. Spurred by the booming culture for live video merchandising in China, Canton Fair organisers went virtual, and it is for this that Ningbo MH’s employees are training, with newly bought video equipment, soft lighting and catchy welcome lines.

“With the lockdown everywhere in the world, we haven’t met with any clients since January,” said Wendy Ma, marketing manager at Ningbo MH. “We hope to tell them that we’re still here and please don’t forget us.”

Amid the novelty of the virtual surroundings, the stakes for many of China’s exporters could not be higher. The collapse in global trade since the first quarter and the surge in unemployment at home mean that executives may not have the time to wait for reopenings in Europe and the US to spur business again, and the online fair is a chance to make sales now.

“China’s exports are facing great downward pressure this year, as global demand is weakening due to the pandemic, coupled with the anti-globalisation trend,” said Wang Youxin, a researcher at the Bank of China Institute of International Finance in Beijing.