Pitching the right note for buyers, sellers

HE WOULD be the last person to suggest it, but Benjamin Chau probably knows more than most about the intricacies of nurturing business-to-
business and business-to-consumer relationships in Asia.  For 20 years he has headed the team now crafting 35 trade fairs, including 11 of Asia’s largest, five of which are the world’s largest, for the Hong Kong Trade
Development Council.
Here, Chau explains how he entices buyers and sellers to ‘dance’
together, and how he creates new concepts to increase visitor numbers. Last year he hosted 37,000 exhibitors and 760,000 buyers from 86
countries and regions, while driving 24 million inquiries through the
HKTDC’s dedicated website . . . 

A SHIFT in buying patterns, a growing number of online shops, and shorter product life cycles have created increasing demand for small order suppliers.
“Today, buyers want small but frequent
orders, because if the product does not sell, the risk is not so high,” says Benjamin Chau, Deputy Executive Director of the Hong Kong Trade
Development Council (HKTDC).
For many Asian manufacturers who traditionally advertised their ability to handle big orders, the impact has been dramatic. Today, 10,000 of the 130,000 companies on the
HKTDC’s supplier database say they will meet small orders.
Chau explains: “The definition of a small
order depends on the product. For watches and jewellery, it is a few pieces – maybe as few as five; for gadgets, maybe 30 pieces; for a pen, it will be 1,000. So it is a range of five to 1,000 pieces.”
The trend to smaller orders, he says, began about seven or eight years ago – before that, the big buyers would come to Hong Kong two or three times a year to place big orders from Hong Kong companies.
To meet small order demand, the HKTDC in 2012 introduced a Small Orders Zone to its trade exhibitions and 18 months later began to transform this into an online transactional platform.
Working with PayPal, it created an arrangement through which any of the 10,000 supplying companies meeting small orders could accept online payment – some 2,000 of these suppliers have already signed up.
Says Chau: “As a quasi-government agency, we can’t really get into the commercial aspects of payment, but PayPal offered a way forward for both buyers and suppliers. Over 18 months we have concluded thousands of transactions, and we have found very few cases of commercial dispute.”
For its small buyers, the HKTDC has also arranged preferential rates for fulfillment, again through PayPal, for shipments through major logistics suppliers including DHL, Kerry Logistics, Hongkong Post, Aramex and China’s SF Express. “Sometimes when you ship small amounts the rates can be very high,” says Chau. “So we need to help. “And with e-commerce now so popular, we have to venture into this area too.”
Chau is at the coalface. For 20 years now, he has headed the team behind the HKTDC’s
international trade exhibitions. Last year, the
HKTDC ran 35 fairs, which form 11 of the largest marketplaces of their kind in Asia. Five of these are the world’s largest.
The numbers are staggering. Last year
HKTDC’s trade fairs hosted 37,000 participating exhibitors from more than 86 countries and regions.  The exhibitions attracted more than 760,000 buyers from every corner of the world, including 8,500 from Australia.
As the individual shows have grown and morphed to cater for new consumer markets, Chau has spun off new events within existing frameworks. “Based on market and industry change, we have segregated one fair into two fairs, two fairs into three fairs,” he says.
“We pioneered this back in 2000. At the time, our Gifts and Houseware Fair was gigantic, with close to 2,000 exhibiting companies and more on the waiting list, so we separated it into two shows -— one Gifts & Premium Fair and one Houseware Fair. Over time, we have separated this into seven separate trade shows in April. Gifts and houseware are related to each other — but houseware is also related to electronics, and electronics is related to lighting, so we keep spinning off.
“We also identify trends. We saw more countries attaching importance to green technology, so 10 years ago I started a new show we called Eco Expo Asia, in partnership with Messe Frankfurt. This has become one of the most
important environmental technology shows in Asia, with 320 companies exhibiting last year.”
With Eco Expo Asia, Chau introduced a new approach.
“Most of the HKTDC fairs are B2B shows - Business to Business – and some B2C – Business to Consumer. But we see Eco Expo Asia also as a B2G show – Business to Government.
“Where you touch on environmental protection technology, governments play a very important role.
“So we approached the Environment Bureau of the (HKSAR) Government, asking them to be co-organiser of the fair.  Each year, the Bureau now helps invite officials from the central and provincial governments in China who are
responsible for environmental protection. They join the show to explain their future needs and their trend requirements over the next five to 10 years, so that the supplier knows what the market will be looking for in the future. We have been doing that now for several years.
“The public, the consumer, also plays a part in Eco Expo Asia because the Government can let the public know what it is planning, the public can better understand Government policy, and the international technical companies can showcase and educate the public on what they offer. So it is truly a B2B, B2C and B2G show.”
In terms of incentives to attract buyers and sellers to his events, Chau offers an eclectic mix. “I tend to offer incentives to buyers rather than exhibitors,” he says. “The exhibitor does not ask for a discount if he knows you can bring genuine buyers to him – if he knows that, he is often even prepared to spend a little more.”
Chau adds: “When we offer buyer incentives, the money is actually coming from the exhibitors. They are my stakeholders, they put their stake with me, so I allocate those resources to advertising and promotion and incentives. “A lot of my resources are targetted at the new buyers, coming for the first time. It is like offering a free sample — if you come to my show and find it a good resource, you will come again.”
For major buyers, Chau will set up what he calls a ‘reverse’ exhibition where the buyer has his own stand — not to promote products but to source suppliers. Chau says: “We will arrange for the exhibitors to be interviewed by buyers; the exhibitors bring samples to present to the buyer at this stand. We started this two years ago and it has been very useful — a reverse exhibition and business matching based on buyers’ requirements.”
Chau told ATI he always compares his exhibitions with a matching party for men and women. “The ‘table’ must have a good setting, good food and beautiful music to encourage participants to ‘dance’, then they form a relationship.
“So a lot of effort and resources goes into venue decoration to create an atmosphere that is not just promotion/production capability but, more importantly, brand-building.
“All Asian suppliers are good at OEM manufacturing – but these days they are very good at design and some of them are venturing into brand-building.
“So we have introduced a brand name setting in some of our shows – like the Gift Fair, where we have a Hall of Fine Design, and our Houseware Fair, where we have a Hall of
Elegance and our Electronics Fair, where we have a Hall of Fame, and in our Watch & Clock Fair, where we have Salon de TE, spotlighting premium watch brands. The dressing up and the decoration for each of these is entirely different, and we have a design team of around 50 people now working on our exhibitions.”
One of Chau’s biggest challenges is space. The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre opened in 1988 offering 17,800 sq m of exhibition space, which was quickly saturated. 
This led to construction of an artificial island in Hong Kong Harbour to create an additional 28,800 sq m of exhibition space in a new wing. The new facility opened in time to host the Handover Ceremony of Hong Kong sovereignty to China in 1997.
Unable to reclaim further land from Hong Kong Harbour, the HKTDC in 2006 began a HK$1.4 billion project to construct a multi-
storey bridge-like structure spanning the water channel to connect the HKCEC’s two wings to create what it calls an Atrium Link expansion, providing a further 19,400 sq m of exhibition space. “But at 66,000 sq m, our facility is still not big enough,” says Chau. “It is again saturated.”