Tencent powers Canton Fair with digital tools

Tencent Holdings Ltd is adopting a suite of digital exhibition tools to raise efficiency of the 131st Canton Fair, which is taking place online and runs through to Sunday.

As a three-year technology partner for China's export-import expo, Tencent has made major revamps on the technology architecture of this year's online platform powered by its cloud unit, aiming to enhance functionalities and optimize procedures during virtual meetings.

For instance, exhibitors want to either add new functions or improve existing ones such as livestreaming sessions or official product launches during the expo. Normally this requires a couple of days for the changes to materialize, including everything from writing codes, testing, launch and customer confirmation.

"With our upgraded application architecture, this process can now be reduced to hours or even minutes, greatly enhancing efficiency," said Zhang Ye, vice-president of Tencent Cloud.

Another example is to enhance the expo's registration procedure through detail amendments such as interface layout. This has led to a 50 percent rise in pass rate for the successful registration of international procurers as expo attendees, Zhang added.

Backed by an array of proprietary technologies, Tencent is also looking to introduce more functions to the expo, such as automatic simultaneous interpretation during livestreaming sessions.

With more than 25,000 overseas and domestic exhibitors, the fair covers 16 categories of goods varying from consumer products to manufacturing machinery, during the 10-day virtual event.