Xiamen-Taiwan Export Fair Booths Booked Up

Booths for the Fifth Xiamen-Taiwan Export Commodity Fair, to be held between April 12-15, are booked up by enterprises from inland and Taiwan, according to sources with the organizing committee of the fair in Xiamen, a port city of southeast China's Fujian Province.

The annual trade fair is the only channel for the inland provinces to promote goods exchanges with Taiwan and has been successfully held four times.

A total of 1,200 seats were arranged for the fair, an increase of 50 percent than that of last year. Reservations made by enterprises from Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei and Guangdong to the fair hit a record high and even some business firms from west, rarely seen at the fair, showed great enthusiasm. For example, Qinghai in the northwest will for the first time participate in the fair.

The planned 400 booths for Taiwan entrepreneurs are not enough to meet demand. The number of reservations from Taiwan has already topped that of the previous years, with 258 enterprises booking 421 booths.

Trade fairs for similar purposes are also held in other areas like Guangdong, which have all succeeded with good turnovers and lend rich experiences on economic cooperation across the Straits.

Up to now, Taiwan investors have become Guangdong's second largest source of overseas investment after Hong Kong.

"Taiwan investors are now facing three opportunities: the development of China's western region; the adjustment of the industrial structure of the mainland and China's accession into the World Trade Organization this year," said Tang Shubei, executive vice-president of the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and also deputy head of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council.






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