(Yicai Global) July 26 -- The 3rd China International Import Expo will be held in Shanghai from Nov. 5 to 10, just one hundred days from now.

The 100-day countdown press conference was held on July 24. The company exhibition area is 360,000 square meters this year in a 20 percent rise, Sun Chenghai, deputy director of the China International Import Expo Bureau, said at the conference. Online and offline contract signing, project collaboration and promotional activities were held to cope with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on recruitment, and registration is basically now finished, Sun said.

Fortune 500 companies and sector leaders are highly enthusiastic. Exhibitors are generally expanding their exhibition area from that of previous year and will exhibit new coronavirus prevention and control products such as artificial lungs, ventilators, as well as pea protein-based man-made meat and a slew of new technologies, products and services.

"More than 90 percent of the settled companies have made profits in the first month, and consumers have also been able to buy goods at the expo at low prices the same as their original ones," said Cai Jun, general manager of the trading center.

Thirty-five members of the exhibitor alliance signed a three-year, long-term expo registration memorandum yesterday. Most of these companies are Fortune 500-listed industry leaders. They focus on long-term common development with the CIIE. Their memorandums reflect their resolution to stick with the Chinese market.

The CIIE has gradually formed an ecosystem of ‘exhibits becoming commodities, exhibitors becoming investors, and buyers becoming traders’ since the first expo kicked off in 2018.

Greenland G-Hub, which opened in 2018, is one of the long-lasting exhibiting, procuring and transaction platforms for the CIIE. The platform has seen over CNY6 billion (USD857.1 million) in both upstream and downstream deals.

The Shanghai Hongqiao Import Commodity Exhibition and Trading Center exempts exhibitors from rents and deposits, and provides them with furnishing as well as shopping guides and cashiers, so that small and medium businesses can easily settle in.

Editor: Ben Armour