《廣交會台上五個人講同一件事：賣產品嘅時代，正在被「賣能力」取代》Five Speakers at the Canton Fair, One Message: Selling Products Is Being Replaced by Selling Capability

[Zheng Ge's Take]

On 16 October, in the Canton Fair hall. The 2026 Pearl River International Trade Forum, in the year the fair turns seventy — 1957 to 2026, the 140th session. Five people on the stage, a room full of exhibitors and buyers below it.

Jiang Xiaojuan, a professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, put it in one line: "This road is being rewritten." She gave the new road a name — native globalisation. Her point was that companies used to go domestic first and overseas later, working the home market through before stepping out; today a good deal of technology, product and service is aimed at the global market from the day it is born, and AI has scrambled that rhythm completely.

Her advice to companies came in three parts: build a global outlook, build a credible brand, and line up with international compliance standards from the start. It sounds reasonable, and after twenty-six years in business I know that for most exporters those three are three mountains.

The other four people on that stage were talking about the same thing. What I saw was a turn: from selling products to selling capability.

Act One: Five Speakers, One Point

Zhu Lei, vice president of Gree Electric, was the most direct: "Buyers do not come to the Canton Fair only for orders. They come for partners who share their sense of value." He gave an example — at Gree's plant in Brazil, 98 per cent of the staff are local. His words: "We did not send Chinese workers over. We let the brand grow inside the local society."

Jiang Cong, vice president of international business at Xiaomi, took it a layer further: what they sell is not a phone or a watch but a whole technology system, an industry ecosystem and continuing service. That kind of business cannot be closed at a single exhibition; it is built out of hard technology, compliant operation and sustained local investment, a little trust at a time.

Huang Yin, managing partner for South China at EY, put it most abstractly and most accurately: globalisation is moving from a concentrated, efficiency-driven division of labour to a diversified, networked way of operating; Chinese companies going abroad have moved from selling goods to selling research, supply chains and operational management — from products going out to capability going out.

One more speaker said something I kept. Can Yildirim, managing director of Xuehualing Electrical Appliances and a buyer who has been in China for thirty years, said the future of cooperation is not who squeezes the price and who takes the order, but "value co-creation" — defining the product direction together, digging out what end users actually need together.

Five people, five vantage points: an academic, a manufacturer, a brand, an accountant, a buyer. All of them saying the same thing — the relationship between seller and buyer is turning from a transaction into a collaboration.

Act Two: The Numbers, and One Company, Confirm It

It is not only the stage that says so; the numbers say it too. At the 140th session there were more than 700 new-product launch events, with the number of launches up 15 per cent, and a new-product launch area for the first time; the trade services zone covered all ten categories of producer services for the first time; and an overseas buyer membership scheme was introduced for the first time, points-based, with benefits reaching into travel, accommodation and payment.

Around 340,000 overseas buyers attended, with strong sign-up from Belt and Road countries. Consumer goods, intermediate goods and capital goods accounted for 56.6, 30.7 and 17.3 per cent respectively. Twenty-two smart application scenarios and sixteen AI applications were introduced for the first time; full-scene booth-level navigation is accurate to one metre and covers more than 75,000 booths.

Of all those figures, the last two are the ones I watch. Navigation to the metre across 75,000 booths is an investment in efficiency. Twenty-two smart scenes and sixteen AI applications are a display of capability. The fair itself is moving from laying goods out to showing what it can do.

Home building materials are a ready-made example. It used to be single products and price competition; now it runs from whole-house customisation to prefabricated space, from smart sanitary ware to healthy home, from making at home to running plants abroad. The case in point is Guangdong Jueshi: its own factory in Melbourne, a directly operated store in New Zealand, "made at home, sold globally, serviced locally", with products in 100 countries and regions.

The change, in one sentence: from selling a product to delivering a space. Scenarios raise the ticket and the value added, and Chinese manufacturing walks toward Chinese intelligent manufacturing.

Act Three: The Product Era's Dividend Is Gone, and AI Makes Capability Impossible to Hide

The first thread: the dividend of the product-selling era is gone. Competing on price and shipping single items is over. What buyers look for now is a partner who can define the product direction with them and dig out end demand with them. A supplier who can only quote sits in the position that is easiest to replace.

When I was in export, one quotation sheet was enough to open a business. Today the quotation sheet is the ticket in, not the weapon.

The second thread: AI has accelerated it. AI lowered the barrier to copying capability and raised the transparency of showing it. Whether a brand is credible, whether a supply chain has depth, whether data has been accumulated — the things that used to hide behind information asymmetry are now plain at a glance.

What I see is this: export trade used to earn the spread on "I know and you do not". Today a buyer opens two or three AI tools and finds out most of it. What cannot be hidden has to be built.

Act Four: GEO Is a Content Tool, Not Magic

The third thread touches the work I do myself: GEO. I will keep it plain.

The change at the fair has already moved online. Before buyers come to the Canton Fair they are searching for suppliers and solutions in Doubao, DeepSeek and ChatGPT. If your brand does not appear in what those platforms answer, you are not even in the running to be considered.

But what I see is this: GEO is a content tool, not magic. It decides whether anyone sees you in an AI answer; whether they believe you once they have seen you still depends on your product, your delivery and your record. A tool solves visibility. It does not solve trust.

So I would not call GEO the way out. The way out is still what those five people on the stage described: capability, localisation, compliance, co-creation. GEO is only one channel through which that capability gets seen.

The fair is seventy and it is changing, and exporters have to change with it — from competing on price, to competing on trust, to competing on being visible in the AI era. None of the three can be skipped.

Sources: Southern Network and 21st Century Business Herald, republished via Toutiao, 18 October 2026. This piece quotes only facts stated publicly in those reports and remarks made publicly by the participants; everything else is Hany's own observation.