This year’s Spring Festival will represent a strong opportunity for Italian exporters to consolidate gains in the Chinese market while staking out new markets for high-end food-related products, analysts said according to Xinhua press agency. The 2019 Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese Lunar New Year, gets underway starting today. It is the most important festival in China with a week-long holiday. Italian total exports to China expanded dramatically between 2016 and 2017, according to data from ISTAT (Italy’s National Statistics Institute), up by nearly a fifth to 15.2 billion euros. The task for Italian exporters this year is to hold onto gains from the last two years while growing exports in sectors with high potential. And the Spring Festival will play a key role, they said.
CHINA’S SPRING FESTIVAL AND FOOD PRODUCTS
“It is hard to for a company to find footing in a big market like China – said Denis Pantini, head of the agro-industry section at Nomisma. An event like the Spring Festival can level the playing field a bit”. Small companies that produce important Italian exports like wine, olive oil, and cured meats benefit from having potential distributors and buyers gathered at one event. Pantini said the Chinese market for those kinds of Italian food-related products – especially finished products like cheese rather than base ingredients such as milk – is an area primed for growth. “Chinese consumers are more in-tune with foreign products and for Italy the market remains largely untapped. To put it into perspective, Italy sold 520 million dollars in food products to China last year. Brazil exported 28 billion dollars”.