CIIE Participants Deepen Research, Manufacturing and Healthcare Ties in China

What changed

The ninth China International Import Expo opened in Shanghai on November 5, with nearly 200 companies and institutions returning for every edition since 2018.

For many of them, the expo has grown from a sales booth into a long-term China operation:

• doTERRA’s orders rose from 380 million yuan at its first appearance to 1 billion yuan, while its booth expanded from 9 to 300 square metres.
• Danone opened a Shanghai research and innovation centre and continues expanding production in Wuxi.
• Intuitive Fosun’s da Vinci surgical robots have reached more than 100 Chinese hospitals and served over 1 million patients.
• Olympus reached a purchase agreement worth more than 7.5 million yuan with a hospital in Anhui.

Why it matters

The clearest message is that the expo is no longer just a showroom. For companies that keep returning, it has become a bridge into Chinese sourcing, research, manufacturing and healthcare.

doTERRA now gets 23 essential-oil raw materials from China. Its latest product, made with local perilla, shows how the relationship has shifted from selling imported goods to developing products around Chinese resources.

Danone’s Shanghai centre has worked on breast milk, gut function and immunity since opening in 2020. Its new research and innovation centre in Pudong, alongside the expanding Wuxi base, points to a deeper commitment: work done in China is intended to feed both the local market and the company’s wider innovation network.

Bayer has displayed nearly 70 debut products across its years at the expo and signed more than 10 strategic agreements in 2025. The company’s presence now spans prescription medicines, consumer health and crop science. That breadth matters because it shows how repeated participation can turn a single trade event into several parallel business relationships.

The healthcare story is especially tangible. Intuitive Fosun’s surgical robot began as unfamiliar technology at the first expo and later moved into routine use in hospitals across China. Olympus’s Anhui agreement shows how the platform can also connect Shanghai’s exhibition floor with purchases made far beyond the host city.

The informed outlook is that the expo’s value will increasingly be judged by what happens after the banners come down. If returning exhibitors keep converting displays into local research, production and hospital deployment, the event will function less like an annual marketplace and more like infrastructure for long-term commercial ties. The report does not establish that every cited order became a completed sale or that the expo alone caused each investment, but the direction is clear: persistence is producing deeper roots.