Since its first edition in 2022, the Global Digital Trade Expo has been running for five years. As China's only national-level trade fair on digital trade, the Expo is rooted in Zhejiang with national reach, and has moved systematically from building a platform to clustering an industry, from testing new business formats to forming an ecosystem, from a regional experiment to a national model.

Over those five years, the Expo has become more than a venue for display and dealmaking. It is now an important window onto where China's digital economy is heading. The event has used convening power to build momentum, exhibitions to grow industry, and openness to enable business, cultivating new digital trade formats, drawing in new players, and testing new industry rules, all of which feeds experience back into the country's broader push for high-quality digital trade.

To date, the Expo has drawn more than 5,000 Chinese and foreign exhibitors, brought together 87,000 professional buyers, and hosted over 1,200 debuts, premieres and first showings. With AI now cutting across the whole event and intelligent business formats on concentrated display, China's digital trade is moving faster toward being smarter, more grounded in the real economy, and more widely accessible.

Five Years of Advance, Building New Strength in Digital Trade

The Expo has grown steadily in scale over five years, widening the range of sectors on show and raising the platform's standing. What began as a national forum for digital trade exchange is gradually becoming a full industrial ecosystem spanning computing power, models and applications, and a significant platform for linking global markets, driving technical innovation and pushing industrial upgrading.

A number of companies have also grown up on the back of the Expo.

Spacety-2, which specializes in space-based AI digital services, is one example of a tech startup that has grown alongside the Expo. The company won the gold Pioneer Award at the second edition and has kept using the event to iterate on its technology, connect with resources and open new markets. In recent years it has taken its satellite digital services to countries along the Belt and Road, moving from R&D to overseas deployment and becoming a case study in Chinese hard-tech going global.

Foreign companies are also deepening their bets on the Chinese market. After Yokogawa Electric's first appearance at the Expo, it picked up a large number of business leads and went on to open an office in Hangzhou, pushing further into China's industrial digitalization market. AstraZeneca has taken part for five straight years, progressing from exhibiting and meeting industry partners to establishing a regional headquarters, incubating tech startups and building out an industrial ecosystem.

Several Zhejiang companies have used the Expo to change roles and upgrade their businesses.

DTStack spent years as a technical contractor for the Expo, building the event's smart command dashboard and data visualization systems. This year it appeared as an exhibitor for the first time, showing data governance and AI agent solutions aimed at helping industrial firms work through the practical problems of deploying large models.

Zonande Cartoon has used the Expo to push homegrown original animation IP into more than 100 countries and regions, making it a flagship for Zhejiang's digital culture exports.

Digital Trade Keeps Scaling Up

The Expo's spillover effects continue to spread, helping expand the scale of Zhejiang's digital trade.

Zhejiang's digital trade imports and exports reached 845.25 billion yuan in 2025, a seventh consecutive year of double-digit growth, according to official figures. From January to August this year, the figure came to 662.06 billion yuan, up 9.2% year on year.

Zhejiang continues to test approaches to digital trade in institutional innovation, new business formats and the clustering of market players, using the Expo as a national platform to export what it learns to the rest of the country.

AI Is Reshaping How Digital Trade Works

One of the deepest changes across five editions is AI's shift from frontier experiment to large-scale deployment, which is changing how digital trade itself operates.

At early editions, AI showed up mainly as cutting-edge technology and novel exhibits. Now AI agents, multimodal technology and industrial intelligence platforms are working their way into production lines, trade operations and frontline services, and digital trade is moving from simply supplying digital services to enabling the real economy at a deeper level.

Wensli Silk's transformation is a case in point. At earlier editions the company mostly showed one-off innovations such as AI design and digital cultural products. It has since built an inclusive textile AI platform for the whole industry, opening up capabilities including market insight, product design, listing and flexible manufacturing.

The platform lets small entrepreneurs enter the textile business at lower cost and helps the company cut inventory pressure, marking a shift from digitizing itself to digitizing its industry.

As the technology matures, AI is no longer a capability reserved for the largest firms; it is becoming a tool that small and micro enterprises can reach, use and afford. County-level industrial clusters such as Jiaxing's Honghe sweater sector and Haiyan's manufacturing base are drawing on the technology trends surfaced at the Expo to help smaller manufacturers upgrade digitally at lower cost.

Inclusive AI Needs a Security Foundation

Large-scale AI deployment brings new problems around cross-border data, agent applications and data security, making security a critical underpinning of inclusive digital trade.

Local cybersecurity firm DBAPPSecurity has continued R&D on AI application security and used this year's Expo to launch technology addressing AI token security. The West Lake Summit it hosts also ran as an Expo side event, with discussions on AI security, data governance and industry development.

From isolated pilots to broad adoption, industry in Zhejiang and across China is changing how it uses digital technology. Digitalization is no longer a showpiece on the exhibition floor; it is becoming a practical requirement of running a business.

Connecting Global Markets, Testing Digital Trade Rules

The Expo's value lies not only in industrial clustering and deals signed, but in widening opening-up, advancing global digital trade cooperation and exploring digital governance rules.

Its international network has expanded over five years to cover a wide range of countries and regions. This year's edition welcomed Malaysia and Hungary as guest countries of honor, with tens of thousands of international buyers coming to Zhejiang to meet and negotiate.

Beyond the in-person exhibition and business matchmaking, the Expo runs a year-round online platform offering intelligent lead matching and remote negotiation, creating a digital trade channel that stays open all year.

For overseas companies, the Expo is a window onto opportunities in China's digital industries. For Chinese companies, it is a way to connect further with global markets and expand abroad.

Digital trade also depends on logistics and payments infrastructure. Jiaxing's air logistics hub has introduced a digital twin smart supervision system to speed up customs clearance, opening an air route for both digital products and physical goods heading overseas. PingPong continues to build out cross-border payment services in Southeast Asia, easing settlement headaches for smaller firms.

As sea, land and air logistics, cross-border payments and digital services all improve, the integrated infrastructure that supports companies going global is gradually taking shape.

China's Approach as a Reference for Global Digital Governance

Alongside promoting digital trade, the Expo has kept working on the rules and governance that come with it.

Across five editions, it has released more than 100 industry research reports, cooperation initiatives and compliance studies, showcasing Chinese practice on cross-border data flows, digital inclusion, standards for intelligent business formats and support for small and micro enterprises.

Using the Expo as a base, China has deepened Silk Road e-commerce cooperation, China-Africa digital talent exchange and BRICS digital trade dialogue, including discussions on mutual trust in cross-border electronic authentication.

While widening access, the Expo also stresses balancing development with security, testing practical routes for the orderly flow of data as a production factor and offering other countries a reference point for weighing digital innovation, industrial growth and security.

A New Starting Point Toward Digital Trade Leadership

Five years of groundwork have turned the Expo from a trade fair into a significant platform linking industry, capital, technology and global markets.

Looking ahead, Zhejiang will keep building on the Expo as a national platform, drawing on its strengths in the digital economy and an open economy to cultivate new digital trade formats, deepen the integration of AI with the real economy, explore new paths for digital governance, and help China move faster toward becoming a digital trade power.