Canton Fair Phase 1: electronics, appliances, machinery, vehicles

What is on the floor, area by area

The layout below is the one used in the 139th session (spring 2026). The organisers repeat the layout from one session to the next with small changes, so use it to plan, then confirm on the floor plan in the official app the week before you travel.

Area D opened in 2023 and is the quietest of the four. If your list is machinery, start there: the aisles are wider, the reps are engineers rather than sales staff, and you can have a real conversation before lunch.

Who exhibits in Phase 1

Three kinds of company, and it helps to know which one you are talking to.

• Brand exhibitors. The organisers label roughly 3,000 companies across the session as “Canton Fair brand exhibitors”: firms with their own brands, export records and, usually, their own factories. In Phase 1 that means the appliance and tool giants and a long tail of mid-sized factories with a registered brand. Their stands are the double-height ones with the coffee machine.
• Factories on a provincial delegation. Booths are allocated through provincial and municipal trade delegations, which is why the signage above each aisle names a province. A 9 m² booth with two staff and a table of samples is the typical manufacturer. The quality of the product does not correlate with the size of the stand.
• Trading companies. Fewer than at Yiwu or on the marketplaces, but present, particularly in consumer electronics. The tell is a catalogue spanning products that no single factory could make (a power bank, a rice cooker and a garden light on one page). Not a reason to walk away, but a reason to ask who makes what. Our supplier guide has the questions.

How to plan the five days

Phase 1 is the phase where a booth list matters most, because the halls are enormous and the stands are large. Walking Area A end to end without stopping takes an hour.

1. Day 1 and 2: your primary section, booth by booth. Take the list you built beforehand and work it in hall order. Photograph the booth sign, the business card and the product together so you can match them later. Ask for a price sheet; most Phase 1 exhibitors have one.
2. Day 3: the adjacent sections. Appliance buyers should walk lighting and small electricals; tool buyers should walk hardware and the outdoor machinery area. This is where the unplanned finds come from.
3. Day 4: second visits. Go back to the six or eight suppliers that mattered with specific questions: certification documents, tooling ownership, a factory address you can visit on a break day.
4. Day 5: samples and loose ends. Half the booths are quieter and some are packing. Buy display samples, confirm who your contact is, and leave by mid-afternoon.

What to ask at an electronics or machinery booth

The conversation in Phase 1 is more technical than in the other phases and the stakes are higher, because compliance failures on electrical products are expensive and slow to fix.

• Certifications, with documents. Ask to see the actual CE, UKCA, FCC, UL or ETL certificate for the model you want, not a photo of a certificate for a different model. Read the certificate holder’s name: if it is a third company, you have just found the real factory.
• Batteries. Any product with a lithium cell needs a UN38.3 test report and an MSDS before it can ship by sea or air. Ask whether they have them and who paid for them.
• Tooling and moulds. Who owns the mould for the housing? If the answer is “our partner”, a private-label version means paying for new tooling or accepting a shared design.
• Lead time and MOQ in units, not containers. A “one 40-foot container” minimum is fine for garden tools and useless for a range of five power banks. Ask for the per-model figure.
• Spares and warranty. For machinery, ask what happens when a part fails in year two. Factories that export seriously have a spares list and a price for it.

Get the quote in writing as FOB with the port named (Shenzhen, Guangzhou Nansha or Ningbo), with carton dimensions and units per carton. Those two lines are what turn a unit price into a landed cost.

A note on lighting

Lighting is in Phase 1, in Area C, and it is where first-time buyers most often get caught out. A large share of exhibitors come from Guzhen in Zhongshan, the town that makes most of the world’s decorative lighting, and the quality range in one aisle runs from excellent to alarming. For the US, ask for LM-79 and LM-80 test reports on LED products and whether the fixture is listed with UL or ETL; for the EU and UK, ask for the ErP energy label data and the EMC test report. A supplier who has none of these is selling to markets that do not check.

Browse Phase 1 exhibitors before you go

Our catalogue lists the products of Canton Fair exhibitors by the same sections the fair uses, with a landed-cost estimate on each. The Phase 1 sections are:

• Electronics and appliances
• Light and electrical
• Hardware and tools
• Vehicles and two-wheelers
• Manufacturing and machinery

Use it to build the booth list, and if you want a supplier checked before you commit a week to visiting them, the desk in Guangzhou does that for a flat fee per supplier.