China (GuiYang) International Alcoholic Beverages Expo 2012.
Sept. 9th to 13th.
I was part of a group of 18 Hong Kong wine Merchants that participated in this wine fair. Days before the fair I forwarded 60 bottles of wine for display and tasting. Luckily all samples of wine reached the fairground in good condition and on time.
Madam Ramalho and I travel to the fair together. This time we wished to get some business opportunities from this fast growing part of China. We were welcomed by a large group of young volunteers at the GuiYang airport. They are students from the local university supporting their GuiYang government assisting arriving exhibitors and visitors, both overseas and domestic. They are of course strong, energetic and friendly, and they offered us drinks while waiting for other visitors to arrive. Finally they guided us to the pick-up point for our free hotel transfer. We arrive safely at our accommodation some hours later; as you may encounter in other parts of China, traffic jams are common.
The new Exhibition centre of GuiYang is located in a newly developed JINYANG NEW DISTRICT of this city. Like most new exhibition halls throughout China, it is huge and built to be impressive, partly for political reasons. As far as the hardware is concerned, it is absolutely impeccable.
We were at stand Number 7 of the Hong Kong pavilion, in hall 2 “the international exhibition hall”. Within the same hall there were pavilions from Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, etc. Each pavilion had nicely decorated structure.
During the five days of the trade fair, I could see the organising power and capability of the local government. There was a huge stage, a rich and colourful opening performance, great numbers and VIPs from the central government added their gravity. Every day there were many buses with visitors from every corner of nearby provinces. These visitors were of all ages, including many kids and teenagers. I wonder whether the organiser screened the visitors or not? These youngsters are underage for drinking alcohol, and are not traders.
I also wish that, in future, they are able to transfer part of their organizing power into offering better services to the exhibitors, so that we don’t have to running to everywhere on the first day of the fair to get all the essential equipment. Each day we needed to queue for 5 hours for less than 10 pieces of ice, with better organisation this could be reduced to 5 minutes. Later our group found a non-official channel that provided unlimited ice for 20.00 RMB per stand per day. This very much reflect some of the true situation in China.
The show closed abruptly at 5pm each day, because the power was shut down and the hotel coaches left quickly. Missing the transport was risky because there may not be any public transport later.
To me, one thing good about receiving hundred and thousands of visitors was being kept busy all the time, introducing our wines, and offering wine tasting to visitors (Adults only of course). We gave out or sold most of the wine displayed before the final hour.
Visitors who were interested in our company’s wine spent a little longer to chat with us and some returned to buy a few sample bottles.
In general people are very nice, gentile but most of them are short of grape wine knowledge. So they are eager to learn these wine cultures, and compare the differences with their tea and Chinese wine cultures and to tell interesting stories to me and to themselves.
I encountered customers that are very price sensitive; looking for cheap and quick trade. I also received customers that finally returned and decided to buy wines because of a few good reasons I proposed and customers that bought wines as if money were no object to them at all. Thinking about this I felt that somehow they are not paying for the wine so much as the wine knowledge they learn from talking with me and other wine merchants.
I personally enjoyed every moment during the fair, all HK’s wine merchants staying together as a big group in these few days’ wine fair. Every member in the Hong Kong Pavilion is kind of looking out for each other’s back, they do friendly referrals; taking a clients from their own stands to other HK’s stands when a customer/client was looking for something else. It would be a nice network that they are interested in our wine and become our re-sellers.
Please let me know which pictures I posted you like the most. I will offer you a free drinks when you visit me at the Wine and Dine festival early next month.
See you around,
Horace Cheung.