ASEM Trade and Investment Exposition


Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) aims to serve as an important bridge between Asia and Europe. Since its inception in 1996, ASEM has been playing a positive and facilitating role in securing closer ties and cooperation among ASEM members.
Economic cooperation is the basis and pillar of Asia-Europe cooperation. With the accession of new members, ASEM now has a membership of 38 countries with a population of 2.4 billion people and an aggregate GDP of the half of the world’s total. ASEM members are strong in scientific and technical capacity, rich in natural resources, have huge markets and strong economic complementarities and there are broad room for economic cooperation. At a time when economic globalization and regional economic integration are developing rapidly, it is important to further intensify cooperation between Asia and Europe so as to give full play to the comparative advantages of both sides.
Keeping this in mind, at the Fifth ASEM Summit Meeting held in Vietnam last October, China put forward the proposal to host the ASEM Trade and Investment Exposition (ASEM Expo) in 2005. The proposal had been co-sponsored by Austria, Germany and Thailand and was adopted at the Summit Meeting. We hope that China’s hosting of the ASEM Expo may encourage ASEM members to carry out similar activities.
To make the Expo a success, we conducted extensive consultations internally and with our ASEM members. Finally we decided to host the ASEM Expo together with the China International Fair for Investment and Trade (CIFIT). We believe that by putting these two events together, we can make better use of the resources and experience of CIFIT and therefore provide more opportunities for business people of ASEM members. We hope that the officials and business people from ASEM members will actively participate in this event.