Prefabricated houses draw overseas buyers at Canton Fair

Overseas buyers have shown favor to prefabricated houses on display at the ongoing Canton Fair in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, appreciating their high quality and complete service packages.

Officially known as the 140th China Import and Export Fair, the autumn session of this biannual event runs from Oct 15 to Nov 4, with the five-day second phase focusing on Quality Home Life since Friday.

The Phase II features an exhibition area of over 515,000 square meters with over 25,000 booths, drawing more than 10,000 enterprises from around the world.

To address growing overseas demand for new home scenarios and better service packages, the Chinese exhibitors are presenting integrated solutions at the event.

At the prefabricated house and courtyard facilities section, a transformable prefabricated house has attracted a constant stream of visitors. With an electric telescopic transmission structure, the product can automatically switch between an enclosed building and a courtyard house within 40 seconds.

"We have received about 600 to 800 customer leads. Some buyers placed orders the moment they saw the product," said exhibitor Zhang Yong.

Christopher from Canada was interested in one of the integrated prefabricated houses on display. He said the product fits the market demand in Canada, where a tight housing supply is compounded by long construction periods and high costs.

"You have an all-in-one solution. And Chinese manufacturing, we saw that in a factory. It has a very high standard. The service package of the product is there, so they will be very competitive, and we are super excited about this product," Christopher said.

The all-in-one solutions have gone beyond fabricated houses to other home products. Data show that about 36.5 percent of the exhibitors have turned to the "product plus service" model at the event.

"Since Brazil has numerous infrastructure projects, the demand for construction equipment is very high. Previously, finding suppliers requires visiting multiple locations and repeatedly exchanging samples, [which is] a very labor-intensive process. Here, I can speak directly with manufactures, understand the details, and examine their equipment first-hand, which saves a great deal of time," said Cesar Savino, a Brazilian buyer.

Prefabricated houses draw overseas buyers at Canton Fair

Prefabricated houses draw overseas buyers at Canton Fair

Prefabricated houses draw overseas buyers at Canton Fair

The World Young Scientist Summit opened on Saturday in Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, gathering more than 800 scientists and entrepreneurs from over 60 countries and regions.

The event also features an exhibition center outside the main conference venue, with innovative products designed for real-world applications drawing visitors from around the world.

Many are looking beyond the displays to explore potential partnerships, with innovations ranging from the recycling of valuable minerals from construction waste to artificial intelligence (AI) applications across industries.

"Our new approach to handling solid waste uses low-carbon, firing-free and low-temperature rapid-drying processes to turn various types of solid waste into industrial raw and auxiliary materials and recycled building materials," said Shao Zhang, vice president of the Wenzhou Hailuo Group.

"Because in Brazil, we don't have this kind of technology [of using] construction waste to build this. We have searched for new technology, and we are the representative association of engineers in Brazil. We came to China maybe to bring this technology to Brazil," said Leonardo Monteiro Rodrigues from the Brazilian Federation of Engineers.

Priyanga Talagala, a senior lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, highlighted the multilingual capability of an AI agent on display.

"It can understand many different languages. Actually, we are from Sri Lanka, and we tried with our own mother tongue, and she could understand our language very easily, even though it's not very common all around the world," she said.

A wheelchair caught the eyes of Ashutosh Tiwari, secretary general of the International Association of Advanced Materials, which is headquartered in Sweden. Tiwari said he had decided to introduce the product to the European market in cooperation with the Chinese exhibitor.

"So I've taken a picture of the company. And officially, our office will contact [them] to start the business in Sweden and Europe," he said.

New technologies draw global young scientists to Wenzhou