BEIJING, Nov.16 (Xinhua) -- As China's first national imports-theme expo, the first China International Import Expo (CIIE) kicked off on November 5, which is designed to set up a stage for global economic and trade cooperation.
The event has attracted more than 3,600 enterprises from 172 countries, regions and international organizations in the world with debut of 5,000-odd exhibits, and over 400,000 Chinese and foreign purchasers coming for business deals.
---Being a world trade stage
Besides China, a total of 81 international organizations like WTO, UNIDO and ITC and countries ranging from developed, developing to least developed ones from five continents attended the CIIE.
Apart from countries and organizations, enterprises across the world are also major participants of CIIE. The intelligent and high-end equipment exhibition area of CIIE attracted over 400 enterprises among Fortune Global 500 enterprises, including an array of world-famous sci-tech giants like General Electric, DuPont, Canon, Hitachi, Schneider Electric, Microsoft and Dell.
In addition, the food & agricultural products exhibition area, the medical equipment & medical care products exhibition area, automobile, consumer electronics & appliances, apparel, accessories & consumer goods and service trade exhibition also gathered many world-known enterprises of global countries in related industries.
Wang Bingnan, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Commerce, said that China-hosted CIIE welcomes countries all over the world, which not only represents China’s plan to advance economic globalization and facilitate an open world economy, but also shows China is a responsible and enterprising nation.
---Promoting efficient trade cooperation
In addition to foreign enterprises seeking business opportunities via CIIE, domestic business delegations show great enthusiasm for the event. At present, more than 150,000 professional purchasers from over 100,000 backbone enterprises were present at the event for negotiation and procurement.
Shanghai business delegation from the host city of CIIE includes up to 15,000-odd purchasers coming for production equipment, medical instruments, cosmetics and dairy. In particular, the planned procurement value of product equipment reached up to 10 billion yuan.
Zhao Ping, director of the international trade research department of the Academy of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said that the CIIE promotes the accurate and efficient business negotiation, matchmaking and cooperation. It serves as a significant carrier of China's high-level opening up, and also an important milestone for China to actively expand import.
In the future, China's high-level opening up will embrace broader coverage, from merchandise trade to service trade, and will bring about more and more cooperation opportunities. Subsequently, country-to-country and firm-to-firm economic and trade cooperation will also step to a higher level.
Zhao believed that import is of significance to China's high-quality economic development. It is not only key to our overall economic development and opening up, but also presents an important opportunity for all regions to replace old economic growth drivers with new ones.
Besides, the CIIE is so far world’s first national imports-theme expo. As a magnet for quality products from all over the world, itis bound to open up a world of business opportunities for enterprises.
---Breaking the bottleneck and connecting China to global markets
CIIE, on the one hand, facilitates the direct business cooperation between enterprises and showcases China's determination to open wider; on the other hand, changes the global situation of lacking efficient supply-demand matchmaking and establishes a long-term mechanism for world trade.
This Expo is a symbol of China's economic transformation to some extent. China will achieve a shift from expanding exports to imports, providing more channels for foreign quality goods to China. This shift also represents a key initiative of China to promote trade balance, said Li Jun, director of the Institute of Trade in Services, Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation.
Li added that China will, with its practical actions, continuously stimulate the potential for increased imports, relax restrictions on market access, foster a world-class pro-business climate, explore new horizons of opening up, and promote multilateral and bilateral cooperation.
These efforts are aimed to call for joint efforts of all countries to build an open world economy. We not only set up a trade cooperation matchmaking platform for related countries and enterprises worldwide to display their products, but also develop the "6+365 days" long-term mechanism and provide effective channels for them to explore China's market and break the bottleneck of supply-demand matchmaking, aiming for a new model of higher efficiency for international economic and trade cooperation.
The CIIE, a pioneering effort of China, has showed China's resolve to open its market and pursue trade balance, and made China increasingly recognized as a responsible major country. More importantly, the CIIE will be of great significance to connecting China to global markets, said Zhang Yanling, senior researcher of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China.
The CIIE provides a world stage to help exhibitors promote products and effectively optimize the allocation of global resources. This stage also helps highlight the respective competitive strengths of enterprises worldwide and provides them with learning opportunities from their counterparts. (Edited by Ma Xin, maxin11@xinhua.org)
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