• Exhibitors:

If the exhibition has an official website, you may be able to examine a list of exhibitors who will attend the exhibition or who attended the exhibition in previous years. From this you will be able to judge whether the exhibition is suitable for you to find proper Chinese suppliers, and you can especially look out for the following:

1. Well-known international suppliers attending the exhibition: Nowadays, good Chinese exhibitions attract international exhibitors. Normally these exhibitions are in industries where China is relatively more advanced.
2. Chinese suppliers’ names: You may need to count how many Chinese suppliers are on the list. If you are familiar with China’s province or city names, you may be able to get a rough idea if the suppliers are local or from different provinces. As China is geographically large, it will cost suppliers from other provinces a lot of time and money to attend exhibitions in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangdong. So if one exhibition in Beijing attracted many good suppliers from southern China, it is likely to be a good one as the suppliers consider it worthwhile to attend.
3. Key Chinese suppliers: If you already know several big Chinese suppliers in the related industry, you can judge if the exhibition is worthwhile or not by checking whether these suppliers are attending.

• Organizers:

Just as qualified products are manufactured by qualified suppliers, good exhibitions are organized by good organizers. You can judge whether the exhibition is a sizable one by investigating if the organizer is reliable and experienced. Many international exhibition organizers such as Reed and Koelnmesse are actively organizing big international exhibitions in China. Local players are also growing very fast, and most of the good ones have English websites, where you can get references.

• Product range:

This is not always true but in the past I found that I could not find enough suppliers of certain commodities from exhibitions which apparently had a general scope. For example, if you visit an exhibition with a name like ‘industrial goods exhibition’ to look for casting suppliers, you may only be able to find 5-10 suppliers, even though the exhibition organizer listed casting in the product scope of the exhibition description. In this case, what you may want to do is either attend an exhibition specifically named as a ‘casting exhibition’, or attend a specific industry show as long as you know what industry the castings are used for.

If you have more ideas on how to choose the right exhibition in China to attend, please feel free to make a comment. We will talk about the necessary preparation work exhibitions in Part 3.