A visitor views Belgian candles at the 6th China International Import Expo (CIIE) in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 6, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

China on Wednesday kicked off the application process for global exhibitors looking to participate in the eighth China International Import Expo (CIIE), set to be held in November 2025.

Twenty-six firms headquartered in countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany signed up to participate on-site at the exhibition recruitment launch ceremony in Nanning, the capital city of southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Their exhibition area would total approximately 15,000 square meters.

Several foreign-invested companies attending the ceremony, including U.S. firm 3M and French firm L'Oreal, have been full-time CIIE participants since the expo's inception.

"The CIIE is an excellent platform that greatly facilitates our brand-building, customer interaction and attraction of more business partners, and fosters cooperation with a wider range of ecosystem partners," said Andrew Wu, managing director of Dun & Bradstreet China. The U.S.-based commercial data and analytics firm has been attending the CIIE since 2020.

The CIIE, first held in 2018, is the world's first national-level expo to focus on promoting imports. The first six expos have seen the registration of more than 10,000 overseas enterprises and the release of over 2,400 new products, technologies and services.

An exhibition area of over 350,000 square meters has been booked for the seventh CIIE, which will be held in Shanghai from Nov. 5 to Nov. 10 this year.

"These figures show that the CIIE is a platform full of opportunities, and its appeal to global businesses is growing steadily," said Tang Wenhong, China's assistant minister of commerce. "The CIIE is becoming increasingly popular, which is a vote of confidence from the global business community in China's economic development."

The recruitment launch is part of a campaign that the CIIE Bureau, the main organizer of the CIIE, is conducting to introduce foreign investment into Guangxi in a targeted manner.

Nearly 120 foreign-invested firms and investment promotion institutions are participating in the campaign, which also includes an investment promotional event, a business match-making session, and field trips to several cities in the autonomous region.

To convert exhibitors into investors, the CIIE Bureau has been organizing tours of China for foreign-invested firms to seek trade and investment opportunities as part of similar campaigns since 2021.

The ongoing cooperation campaign is the first to be conducted in an ethnic-minority autonomous region. Previous iterations have seen nearly 1,000 potential foreign investors tour provincial-level regions such as northeast China's Jilin and southwest China's Yunnan.

China has bolstered its efforts to attract more foreign investment to share in the growth dividends of the country's high-quality development.

In late June, a State Council executive meeting said that China will expand its opening-up of key areas, optimize policy implementation, facilitate foreign investment further, and renew its catalog of industries where foreign investment is encouraged.

"China's business environment will continue improving," Tang said. "We welcome everyone to seize the opportunities to achieve greater success in China, and to keep expanding the scope of win-win cooperation."

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