Shanghai Vice Mayor Lu Shan: More and more exhibitors are shifting from "exhibiting for six days" to "putting down roots in China and increasing investment."

Shanghai Vice Mayor Lu Shan stated at a State Council Information Office press conference that Shanghai's debut economy started with the China International Import Expo (CIIE) and has also grown stronger by leveraging the CIIE. The eight editions of the CIIE have cumulatively showcased more than 3,400 new products, new technologies, and new services, and Shanghai's debut economy has upgraded all the way from version 1.0 to version 4.0. Lu Shan introduced that Shanghai has established a "6 days + 365 days" year-round exhibition and sales mechanism. At Hongqiao Import Commodity Exhibition and Trading Center, more than 6,000 brands and 85,000 CIIE-exclusive products from over 120 countries have already gathered. Greenland Global Commodity Trading Hub has, over the eight editions, cumulatively facilitated the debut exhibitions and first stores in Shanghai of more than 200 overseas brands. The online "365 Exhibition and Trade Network" also enables buyers who cannot attend in person to connect. More importantly, the market feedback brought by these new product debuts has strengthened exhibitors' confidence in investing in China - we have seen more and more exhibitors shift from "exhibiting for 6 days" to "taking root in China and increasing investment": some have transformed from traders into investors, creating an industrial model of "produced in China, supplied globally"; some have upgraded from serving the Chinese market to becoming regional global R&D centers, allowing Chinese innovation to feed back into the world. From January to August this year, Shanghai's actual utilized foreign investment was US$11.59 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.9%; the cumulative number of regional headquarters of multinational companies and foreign-funded R&D centers in Shanghai reached 1,120 and 675, respectively.