BEIJING, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- The 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) opened Wednesday in Beijing, as China steps up efforts to expand opening-up in services trade at the outset of the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030).
Running through Sept. 13 at Shougang Park, a former industrial site and venue for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the fair has drawn participants from 90 countries, regions and international organizations, with over 1,800 companies exhibiting on-site. Among them are 473 Fortune Global 500 firms and other industry leaders, including Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson and Siemens.
Themed "Global Services, Shared Prosperity," this year's CIFTIS features a Global Trade in Services Summit, co-hosted for the first time by the World Intellectual Property Organization. A series of forums and business matchmaking activities will also be held during the fair.
During the summit, Zimbabwean Vice President Constantino Chiwenga said the CIFTIS is expected to create many investment opportunities across conferencing, exhibition, infrastructure, and digital services, adding that it will help Zimbabwe identify opportunities for trade in services, build export capacity, and attract credible partners across technology, finance, tourism, education and health care.
Alexander Poulev, deputy prime minister and minister of Economy, Investment and Industry of Bulgaria, said at the summit that trade in services is an important pillar of the China-Bulgarian relationship. "We want to see more Bulgarian products reaching the Chinese market and more Bulgarian companies building long-term partnerships with Chinese businesses," he said.
More than 100 new products and services will make their debut at the fair, covering fields such as information and communications, fintech, and digital and intelligent healthcare.
Another highlight is a new overseas expansion services roadshow area, which offers Chinese companies one-stop professional support to enter foreign markets and expand the global footprint of Chinese services.
The core exhibition area also debuts a showcase of more than 140 innovation cases spanning all 12 categories of services trade, including artificial intelligence, large language models, and intelligent agents, offering a glimpse of where China's services sector is headed.
China has posted rapid growth in services trade, with strong exports of knowledge-intensive services supported by the country's IP and innovation ecosystem, said World Intellectual Property Organization Director General Daren Tang in his video address to the summit.
Latest official data showed that in the first seven months of 2026, China's services trade totaled nearly 4.45 trillion yuan (about 656.6 billion U.S. dollars), up 8.3 percent year on year.
Advancing high-quality development of services trade is a key task in the outline of China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), which calls for intensified efforts to optimize negative list management of services trade, ease cross-border restrictions, encourage services exports, and foster knowledge-intensive services trade. ■
