Chinaplas Exceeds Its Own Attendance Expectations, Sets New Record

Speaking to international plastics trade press on Monday, May 15—one day before show open—Ada Leung, general manager of sales and marketing at show organizer, Adsale Exhibition Services, projected that 140,000 visitors would explore the show’s halls. In the end, however, more than 155,000 people attended the fair, topping the prior year’s then record-setting total in Shanghai by nearly 5% and eclipsing the previous Guangzhou attendance figure from 2015 by more than 20%, according to the China Plastics & Rubber Journal, which is published by Adsale. Of those 155,000, fully 40,048, or nearly 26%, came from overseas.

At that same press conference, Adsale Chairman Stanley Chu noted that China’s plastics industry, along with the rest of its manufacturing sector, was indeed retrenching. However, he also noted that plastics continued to outpace the broader Chinese economy. In fact, in the first quarter of 2017, Chu said that exports of plastics products were up 21.3% year over year, while imports of plastics raw materials grew 37.4%.

“Some sectors are growing by double digits, some by single digits, but plastics is still double digits,” Chu said. “Plastics is one of the sectors that is still experiencing very high growth.” According to Chu, this continued growth could be attributed in part to per capita consumption of plastics in China. That figure stood at only 20 kg per capita in 2012, compared to 162 kg per capita in the U.S. By 2025, per capita consumption in China is forecast to hit 50 kg.  

Next year, the event shifts to a new larger venue in Shanghai and it’s poised to become the world’s largest plastics fair.