On May 17, the BRICS Business Council successfully held the “2022 China-Africa Online B2B Matchmaking Conference”. The conference is one of the cross-border matchmaking series activities for BRICS enterprises. The conference attracted over 60 enterprises from South Africa, over 120 enterprises from 10 other African countries including Kenya、Mozambique、Namibia、Zimbabwe etc, and over 150 Chinese enterprises to attend. Through over 200 online negotiations, more than 120 preliminary cooperation agreements were reached.
During the negotiation section, entrepreneurs discussed business on major products in the fields of economic and trade cooperation between China and Africa, such as palm oil, coffee, wine, corn, gem, manganese ore, etc. under 67 product types in 17 major categories including primary agricultural products, oil crops and processed goods and plant-based cash crops. Before the activities, ICBC, via its independently developed platform “ICBC Business Matchmaker”, completed precision invitation and matching based on participants’ supply and demand information, so that the entrepreneurs could pre-negotiate automatically before the conference in order to reach a better agreement.
“The Conference helped us discover a lot of supply channels in African countries. It saves the intermediate link, and reduces our purchase cost,” said a coffee sales and technical training service company in Changsha, also with the rigorous screening and meticulous services of the organizers, the conference could lower the risks in the import and export trade. ICBC provided diversified forms of negotiation, and the young volunteers from ICBC served as translators for talks between Chinese and foreign enterprises. They helped solve their communication problems at the first acquaintance and created better cooperation opportunities for both parties. It’s noticed, lots of entrepreneurs showed willingness to conduct in-depth discussions about transaction details like product prices and samples after the conference, trying to clinch the deal.
The Business Matchmaking Series among “BRICS+” Enterprises, held by ICBC together with relevant external organizations, serve the BRICS Business Council’s work objective of “Foster High-quality BRICS Partnership, Usher in a New Era For global development”. Through innovative forms like “cloud exhibition + cloud promotion + cloud negotiation + cloud agreement signing”, more than 10 online exhibitions and matchmaking fairs have been held from March to June, covering over 1,000 enterprises from about 20 emerging countries and regions.
So far, ICBC has held the China-Africa economic and trade matchmaking activity with high quality for three years straight, which has helped achieve more than 200 cooperation results, served over 1,500 customers, and reached preliminary cooperation agreements worthy of nearly USD900 million.
The activities are held via “ICBC Business Matchmaker”, a platform independently developed by ICBC. Launched worldwide in August 2020, the platform, based on ICBC’s cross-border operation network and huge customer base, provides integrated online-offline business matchmaking services and “one-stop” supporting financial services such as transaction settlement and financing support to enterprises around the world. The platform has currently attracted more than 70,000 enterprises from 59 countries and regions, signed the cooperation agreement in cross-border business matchmaking with more than 10 domestic and overseas government departments and trade associations, and held more than 160 high-quality cross-border matchmaking events, which have helped reach more than 4,000 preliminary agreements on cross-border cooperation, with an amount of over RMB20 billion. (Source: BRICS Business Council)