The influence of the third China-CEEC Expo & International Consumer Goods Fair (China-CEEC Expo), which concluded in Ningbo in east China's Zhejiang Province on Saturday, goes far beyond the host city.

According to official data, the expo attracted some 15,000 professional buyers and over 120,000 visitors. Purchase orders for products from Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) reached 10.5 billion yuan ($1.5 billion).

This year marks the beginning of the second decade of China-CEEC cooperation, and the two sides hope for closer economic and trade ties.

According to data from the General Administration of Customs of China, the total trade volume between China and CEECs reached 921.1 billion yuan in 2022, and trade has grown at an average annual rate of 8.1 percent since 2012. Mechanical and electrical products have accounted for about 70 percent of the import and export goods between China and CEECs.

Why has China's trade with CEECs grown so rapidly, and why have mechanical and electrical products taken the largest proportion?

Ningbo, a top smart manufacturing city

Over the past decade, more Chinese enterprises have been increasing their competitiveness in the global market by strengthening their research and development capabilities, particularly those in Ningbo.

In fact, Ningbo has emerged as a top manufacturing city in China over the past decade with the most national-level champion enterprises for single product manufacturing. The city's strong industrial foundation and advanced manufacturing technology have attracted numerous high-tech enterprises to set up their production bases there.

"China's smart manufacturing businesses can enable overseas companies to achieve internal growth, and it once increased the sales of a European company five-fold," said Liu Yuan, the executive vice president of Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp.

Though it mainly manufactures auto parts, Joyson also develops, produces and sells automobile interior controllers and sensor systems. In an interview with CGTN, Liu said that the company puts its focuses on intelligence, clean production and safety.

By merging and acquiring the German automotive components producer Preh GmbH in 2011, Joyson created a classic win-win situation: Joyson made its presence in the international automotive market felt while enabling Preh to achieve exponential growth with sales in the Chinese market.

"After the acquisition by Joyson, the actual value brought to Preh is an advantage that it did not have during its 90 years of development in Europe,”Liu said.

An optical component producer, Ningbo Novel Optical, has found its own innovation path through continuous learning. With a self-developed mechanism for bringing up the company's internal efficiency, internal training to improve employees' skillsets, and collaborations with colleges and participations in national technology projects, Novel Optical keeps exploring cutting-edge technologies in optics.

The company that used to make original equipment manufacturing (OEM) for overseas enterprises now produces spaceborne optical monitoring cameras for China's moon probes Chang'e -2, -3 and -4.

Over the past decade, the government of Ningbo has consciously guided its traditional industries to embrace advanced manufacturing. The government encourages enterprises to replace human labor with machines in key production processes and critical technical procedures, transform production lines into automated and intelligent ones, and build digital or smart factories. These efforts have helped enterprises upgrade to modern, electronic, intelligent and digitized operations.

"You don't need to tell Chinese people about digitalization because Chinese people have a great curiosity about things. They are keen to try something out," academician at the National German Academy of Science and Engineering Pete Sachsenmeier told CGTN in an interview. 

In addition, Slovakia's Ambassador to China Peter Lizák told CGTN that he looks forward to more higher-level and broader cooperation with China, particularly between young scientific and technological talents from the two countries. Slovakia was one of the first countries to sign the Memorandum of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015. 

To learn more about Ningbo and the third China-CEEC Expo here.