Shared Market & Future: CGTN explores how buyers and sellers make deals at CIIE

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The China International Import Expo is about buying and selling. But it's not about individual consumers going on spending sprees and bargaining with vendors. CGTN's Zou Yun and Han Peng explore how deals are being closed at the Shanghai event.

ZY: It's an expo. HP: It's a platform. ZY: It is a business match-making. HP: What do they sell and how do they buy?

ZY: Today, I will follow a buyer, HP: and me a seller, ZY: To see what their routines look like.

HP: For a seller, it's mostly about presenting and talking. ZY: And for a buyer, it's about walking and inquiring. Tony Wu is the China head of a global e-commerce platform, and he's here with a very clear goal.

TONY WU, PARTNER & GENERAL MANAGER OF CHINA BEYOND APP "We want to buy a lot of e-commerce supporting services, like payment, like logistics, like local customs clearance."

HP: Phang Lijun is a Singaporean exhibitor. Her goal is to sell more coffee in China in a tea-drinking way.

PHANG LI JUN SUPER COFFEE'S CHINA BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & BRAND MANAGER "So it's very easy. You just need to put a bag of coffee in. Pour the water level of your liking. This is where the beauty comes. You need to steep it, push it, put on a little pressure so that the coffee essence would come out."

And for Tony Wu, he has a long list of places to visit. Because he's not here only to buy services. With his company becoming one of China's most popular sites for online global retail, he's also at the import expo to see if foreign merchants and brands want to join his platform to enter the Chinese market.

TONY WU, PARTNER & GENERAL MANAGER OF CHINA BEYOND APP "I visited 50 different brands and merchants, I think half of them actually have interest to work with us. And also we see the value to work with them, about 10 of them, we already start to have deep collaboration discussion."

For Phang, her booth has been visited by many, including Singapore's senior minister of state.

"We hope that in the CIIE we can expand our network. China is a really big potential market."

"You see, people are queuing up for the coffee."

Chinese consumers' growing thirst for coffee is just a fragment of the upgrading consumer markets that await foreign businesses to come in and fill.

TONY WU, PARTNER & GENERAL MANAGER OF CHINA BEYOND APP "China's market is still in the early stage for high quality life style purchase, the merchants that we visited all have very promised expectation for the Chinese market."

During the expo, merchants like Phang are expected to interact with more than 150,000 registered buyers from around the globe. Remember, these are professional buyers. Once they buy it, they buy a ton of it, not a bag of it.

PHANG LI JUN SUPER COFFEE'S CHINA BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & BRAND MANAGER "We see that it's a huge potential now. This is the right time for us to come in strongly and set a foothold in China."

And it's the right time for these two to meet and talk about bringing Phang's coffee to Wu's online retail platform. Business talks like this are taking place around the clock, anywhere at the expo.

TONY WU, PARTNER & GENERAL MANAGER OF CHINA BEYOND APP "This is a world, every country come here, they bring their best products, service, their vision about the next generation to here. We can work together to support the Chinese market."

ZY: In this business match making, sometimes they made deals. HP: Maybe sometimes they don't. ZY: Either yes or no, it doesn't hurt for the sellers and buyers to sit down and have a cup of coffee.

HP: Even though the expo lasts just 6 days, the business opportunities generated by it goes way beyond that. ZY: Or in other words, it is an expo that's non-ending.

Cheers and see you next year. Zou Yun, Han Peng, CGTN, Shanghai.