Foshan factory visits and escort interpreting: what 594 Canton Fair exhibitors say about each district

Verified 18 September 2026. We are a Guangzhou interpreting company. We are not an audit or inspection body, not a law firm, and not the Canton Fair organiser. This is not legal advice and it is not compliance advice. Nothing below decides anything for anyone: whether a plant lets you in is the plant's call, whether an audit passes is the audit body's call, and who gets into the Pazhou halls is the Fair's call. Wherever a number comes from our own data rather than from an official document, we say so in that sentence.

Foshan is the city where the question people usually bring to a China factory trip — is this actually a factory, or an office with a showroom? — has a different default answer than in Guangzhou. In our own Canton Fair exhibitor data, two in three Foshan exhibitors are registered as manufacturers, against two in five in Guangzhou. That is the good news, and it is most of the article.

The rest of the article is the part that is not good news: one Foshan district runs the other way, and it is the tile district. On top of that, the companies behind Foshan registrations sit in larger employee bands than Guangzhou's, so a day holds fewer visits. And we should say this on the first screen rather than the last: not one of the 812 interpreter profiles in our pool is registered in Foshan. Every one of them is registered in Guangzhou. A Foshan visit day is therefore a cross-city day, and the travel time inside it is a cost somebody has to carry.

1. Find the row that is you

2. What this data is, and what it cannot tell you

Everything in sections 3 to 6 and section 8 comes from one file we maintain ourselves: a Canton Fair exhibitor directory built from the 139th-session exhibitor list (complete version, dated 16 April 2026), holding 26,270 companies. Of those, 594 are registered in Foshan — 2.3% of the directory, and 12.3% of the 4,811 registered in Guangdong.

Five limits, all of which bite:

It is the 139th session, not the 140th. We do not hold a 140th-session exhibitor list and have not found a published one — that is a statement about our own searching, not an assertion that none exists. Everything below describes who exhibited in the spring. The two sessions overlap, but we do not know by how much and have no data with which to work it out.

We do hold a street address, but it is a registered address, not a plant, and we do not publish it. To be exact about this: when we built the directory we kept a street address for very nearly every record — all 594 of the Foshan ones — but it was collected together with contact names, mobile numbers and email addresses, it belongs to the personal-information side of the file, our exhibitor directory has never published that column, and this article will not either. More to the point, publishing it would not help you: it is the company's registered business address, not the address of a production line. A company registered in Chancheng can run its line in Zhaoqing, in Jiangxi, or nowhere at all. Those two facts together are why section 6 refuses to give you a travel time.

The district column is not in the source data at all — we cut it out of the address. The source spreadsheet has no district field. Our build script takes the registered address above, strips the province and city prefix, and keeps the first 区 / 县 / 镇 segment. That succeeds for 544 of the 594 Foshan records (91.6%). The other 50 are parser failures, not companies without a district — we went back and checked: 15 of those 50 name a statutory district outright in their own address (Nanhai 5, Gaoming 4, Chancheng 3, Shunde 2, Sanshui 1), and fail only because the address opens with 中国广东省佛山市… so the prefix strip misses. So the "district not recorded" row in the tables in sections 4 and 5 is our parsing residue, not a category of company, and should be read that way. What the parser does return also carries variants: 市南海区 (4 records), 大沥镇 (2, a town inside Nanhai), 市顺德区 (1) and 巿禅城区 (1, the only one of the four that is a genuine typo in the address itself). We folded those eight into the five statutory districts, moving Nanhai by six and Shunde and Chancheng by one each. That step is ours too.

The "attended the 139th" flag is derived from an exhibition-history column, not from an attendance register. Our build reads each record's exhibition history and sets the flag if session 139 appears in it. 20,351 of the 26,270 records carry it. The 203 Foshan records that do not are not blank either: 171 have a history ending at session 138, 21 end at 136, 8 end at 137, and only 3 have no history at all. The source file is itself titled as the 139th-session exhibitor list, so that 65.8% looks more like "the share whose history column was updated to the latest session" than "how many actually turned up". Read the table in section 8 on those terms, not as an attendance rate.

Only 242 of the 594 list any product at all (40.7%). When section 5 says a district "leans" towards a phase, the denominator is those 242, not the 594. The other 352 left the field blank, and a blank is not evidence of anything.

3. Two in three Foshan exhibitors are registered as manufacturers

Company type is a field the directory carries, and nearly every record fills it in. Foshan against the three cities it is usually compared with, and against the whole directory:

Rank Foshan against every city in the directory that has a recorded name and at least 200 exhibitors — 39 cities, the full set, not a sample — and it comes fifth on manufacturer share, behind Chaozhou (92.4%), Taizhou (72.9%), Dongguan (69.6%) and Jiangmen (66.7%). Guangzhou is 22nd. Shenzhen is 26th.

What that buys you, practically: in Foshan the base rate is on your side. If you pick a Foshan exhibitor at random and ask to see the line, roughly two times in three the company has told the Fair it is a manufacturer. In Guangzhou the same question is closer to a coin toss, and in Shenzhen the coin is weighted against you.

What it does not buy you: this is a self-declared registration category, collected by the Fair from the exhibitor. It is not an inspection, it is not a certificate, and it says nothing about where the line is. A company can be a manufacturer in every honest sense and still have no production within a hundred kilometres of the address you were given. Section 6 is about that gap.

4. Three product belts, and the one whose registrations run the other way

Split the 594 by district. The manufacturer share swings far more between Foshan's districts than the city average suggests:

Chancheng is the only bucket in the table where trading companies outnumber manufacturers — 51 against 18. We checked all six buckets, not a sample; every other one runs the other way, most of them heavily.

And Chancheng is exactly where the tiles are. Of the 30 Chancheng records that list any product, 15 — half — list a ceramic tile or sanitaryware item, and within those 15 it is 13 tile (full-body tiles, glazed tiles, mosaic, inkjet wood-grain tiles, floor and wall tiles) against 3 sanitaryware, with 1 company in both. So the accurate description is that Chancheng is tile, not "tile and sanitaryware". Shunde and Nanhai between them contribute 8 such companies out of 157 records listing products.

Those two facts sit together awkwardly, and we are not going to resolve them for you, because the data cannot. A trading-company registration in Chancheng is not proof that a firm has no plant; plenty of manufacturers hold a separate trading entity, and the directory records one row per exhibitor, not per corporate group. What it is, is a reason to ask one specific question in writing before you buy a ticket: which legal entity owns the production line I am coming to see, and what is its street address? If the answer is a different company name or a different city, that is not necessarily a problem — but it is the difference between a factory visit and a showroom visit, and you want to know which one you booked.

You do not have to take their word for it either. Ask for the business licence of the entity that owns the line, check its unified social credit code against your contract and invoices, and look that code up yourself on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (gsxt.gov.cn) — free, and reachable from outside China. The supplier is entitled to refuse; a refusal proves nothing, it just means you cannot verify the ownership before you travel, and the trip should be valued on that basis.

The other two belts are cleaner. Using our own keyword map from listed product names onto the Fair's own zone names (the map is ours; the zone names are the Fair's — see section 5), the picture by district is:

Shunde is small appliances and furniture — ovens, deep fryers, induction hobs, kettles, fans, wine cabinets, sofas. Nanhai is split between appliances and the aluminium and window-system trade: profiles, curtain-wall sections, sunrooms, aluminium window frames. Chancheng is tile and sanitaryware. Sanshui echoes both Nanhai and Chancheng at a much smaller scale, and Gaoming's 16 product-listing records are too few to describe as a belt at all.

5. Which phase your supplier is in decides which gap is yours

The 140th session's timetable, quoted from the official notice. This is one lead sentence followed by three dated lines, exactly as the notice sets it out:

第140届广交会计划于2026年10月15日开幕，分三期举办线下展，其中： 第一期：2026年10月15—19日 第二期：2026年10月23—27日 第三期：2026年10月31日—11月4日

Our working translation, since we found no official English version of this notice: The 140th Canton Fair is scheduled to open on 15 October 2026, with the in-person exhibition held in three phases: Phase 1, 15–19 October 2026; Phase 2, 23–27 October 2026; Phase 3, 31 October – 4 November 2026.

The dates between the phases are the changeover gaps, and we do not have to work them out ourselves: in its trade-services zone notice of 4 September 2026 the Fair sets out the days that zone is shut, and calls them the changeover period. To be exact about what that sentence is: it states the service hours of one zone, not a fair-wide opening notice — but the dates it gives line up exactly with the gaps between the three phases above (the 19th to the 23rd, the 27th to the 31st). One sentence:

服务时间为每天9:30—18:00，其中10月20—22日、10月28—30日换展期间闭展。

Our working translation: Service hours are 9:30–18:00 daily; during the changeover days of 20–22 October and 28–30 October, [the zone] is closed. The bracketed subject is ours — the Chinese sentence has no subject and does not need one.

We wrote about the general rule in the Guangzhou factory-visit piece, and it is worth repeating in one line: two gaps exist, but only one of them is yours. The gap before your supplier's own phase is when that supplier is building its stand. The gap after it is when the stand is coming down. For a Phase 1 exhibitor the gap that falls after its own phase is 20–22 October; for a Phase 2 exhibitor it is 28–30 October; a Phase 3 exhibitor has no gap after its own phase at all. Whether they are actually free on those days is still only theirs to say.

So which phase is a Foshan supplier in? Phase assignment follows the product zone, and we can map listed products onto zone names. The zone names and their phases are the Fair's, copied verbatim from Annex 1 of the 5 May 2026 booth-application notice. The keyword map from product names to zones is ours, not an official classification.

We rebuilt that map once, and it is worth saying why, because it bears on how far you should trust it. The first version was written by looking at Foshan's most common products — tiles, appliances, aluminium — which gave the Phase 2 zones fine-grained coverage while five Phase 1 zones (hardware, tools, electronic and electrical products, auto parts, new materials and chemicals) had no keywords at all, and Phase 3 apparel and footwear had almost none. A Phase 1 / Phase 2 split computed on that measures what we typed, not what Foshan is. The second version walks Annex 1 zone by zone and gives the three phases roughly even depth: of the 242 records that list a product, the number we can map rises from 140 to 239. The table below is the second version.

A company counts in a phase if any product it lists maps to a zone in that phase, so one company can appear in several of the phase columns — the last column counts those.

Read the table as a prior, not as an answer. Shunde leans Phase 1, 63 against 32: if your Shunde appliance supplier follows its belt, the gap you want is 20–22 October. Chancheng leans Phase 2, 21 against 9: for a tile supplier the gap you want is 28–30 October. Nanhai is 32 against 29, which is a dead heat and exactly what you would expect of a district that makes both fans and window frames. City-wide it is 121 against 117, also a dead heat — so "Foshan leans towards phase X" is not a sentence worth quoting, and we are not going to write it. A further 44 records point at Phase 3, which has no gap after it; more on that below.

Because the table rests on a keyword map of our own, we also recomputed it with two further maps: a narrow one keeping only five or six of the most typical product names per phase, and a deliberately sloppy broad one that counts any product name containing a character like 电 (electric), 砖 (tile) or 铝 (aluminium). With the first and second versions above that makes four ways of counting. The result: Shunde's Phase-1 lean and Chancheng's Phase-2 lean hold under all four, while Nanhai's direction flips. The first version put Nanhai in Phase 2; the narrow map, the broad map and the rebuilt map all put it in Phase 1. So Shunde and Chancheng can be used as a prior and Nanhai cannot — for Nanhai, the phase has to come from the supplier.

Three things this table cannot do. First, it says nothing about the 352 Foshan records that list no product, nor about the 3 the rebuilt map still fails to reach. Second, it can count the companies that span phases but cannot separate them for you: 40 of the 239 mapped records point at more than one phase (15 at Phases 1 and 2, 16 at Phases 2 and 3, 6 at Phases 1 and 3, and 3 at all three), and those 40 may have no clean gap at all, because they have stand duty in more than one phase. Third, and most important: the 44 records pointing at Phase 3 have no gap whatsoever after their own phase. Nanhai has the most of them, 15 — so if your Nanhai supplier makes shoes, clothing or hosiery, 28–30 October is not its gap, it is its move-in.

None of which you need to guess about. Ask the supplier directly which phase it has been allocated and what its booth number is. Booths are applied for through the Fair's exhibitor system and the exhibitor's own trade delegation, so the company certainly knows; what paperwork it can show you, and what that paperwork says, is not for us to state on its behalf. The table above is for planning before you have an answer, and for judging whether the answer you get sounds right.

One more date to hold: early October carries the National Day holiday. The State Council publishes the exact days each year and each plant sets its own shutdown, so ask your supplier directly whether they are running that week rather than assuming either way.

6. Foshan sits in bigger employee bands — what that does and does not tell you

Employee-size band, from the same directory:

Not every record carries a band: all 594 Foshan records do, 2 of Guangzhou's 717 are blank and 274 of the directory's 26,270 are, so the Guangzhou and whole-directory columns sum to 715 and 25,996 rather than to their totals.

Across those same 39 cities with at least 200 exhibitors, Foshan ranks third on the share of companies in the 500-or-more bands, behind Zhongshan and Dongguan. Guangzhou ranks 15th. But third and fourth are one record apart — Foshan is 88 of 594, or 14.8%, and Quanzhou is 90 of 613, or 14.7% — so do not use the rank as a conclusion. All it says is that Foshan is not short of companies in the largest band.

The employee band is the only size field the directory carries, and size does not yield a visit length — that depends on the process, the plant layout, and how much the company is willing to show you, none of which the directory records. What it does do is this: if you have planned the day against Guangzhou’s size profile, Foshan is a reason to go back and ask yourself whether you have put one visit too many in it.

We are not going to tell you how long the trip takes. Not because routes are hard to look up, but because the address we hold is a registered address rather than a workshop (section 2), so a door-to-door time computed from it would be a precise number about the wrong building — and an invented travel time is how a day falls apart. What we can give you is the method:

1. Ask the supplier for the plant's street address in writing, not the registered address and not a district name.
2. Ask them to state the door-to-door time from where you are staying, and by what means.
3. Check that figure yourself on a map. It is their estimate; treat it as one.
4. Add the visit itself, and let the supplier size that part: ask how long they expect the walk-through to take and which processes it covers. That number is theirs, not ours.
5. Add the return leg at the hour you will actually travel it, not at the hour you travelled out.
6. Book the interpreter for the resulting block of time, not for the meeting.

If the supplier will not put the street address in writing, that is information too. It does not prove anything, and it is a fact worth having before you commit a day to it.

7. Our interpreter pool: 812 people, none of them in Foshan

Every one of the 812 interpreter profiles we hold is registered in Guangzhou. Zero are registered in Foshan. We checked the field across all 812; it holds exactly one value.

That has three practical consequences and we would rather you heard them from us:

The travel time is real and somebody pays for it. An interpreter coming from Guangzhou to a Foshan plant cannot take other work in the hours either side of your meeting. Whether that time is billed, and at what rate, is a term the quote ought to state. Ours states it; whether the others you are comparing state it is for you to ask. Settle it in writing before the day. Overnight stays, transport and meals for cross-city work sit outside our hourly and daily rates and have to be written into the quote separately.

On the interpreting side we have nobody local to Foshan to send. We can supply a Guangzhou-registered interpreter who has done factory visits. We cannot supply somebody who grew up in Shunde and knows which gate to use, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Some languages are very thin, and thin means thin. Counting profiles by language — one profile can hold several, and Chinese is left out of the table below because all 812 hold it:

Portuguese is one profile. Not one team, not one roster — one person, who may already be booked. Arabic is seven, Thai six, Indonesian four, Turkish three. If you need one of these for a Foshan day in late October, the honest advice is to ask now, and to have a fallback ready. Three fallbacks, and who does what in each: first, we look outside the Guangzhou pool and tell you either way once we have looked — if we find somebody it still costs cross-city time and money; second, work through English or Chinese as a relay language, which is slower and loses nuance, and which assumes somebody on your side has the relay language; third, move the date — easily the cheapest option if this trip is not anchored to the fair, and close to useless if it is. We would rather tell you that today than tell you in October.

On subject-matter fit, profiles carry a fair-category tag. The two that match Foshan's belts are electronics and electrical appliances (154 profiles) and building materials and home furnishing (104 profiles); the largest tag is the general foreign-trade one (399). Filtering on those is worth doing, and it is not the same thing as a subject-matter expert.

On credentials: 810 of the 812 profiles carry something in the qualifications field — 555 hold a bachelor's degree, 189 studied at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, 149 hold TEM-8, 92 hold a master's. That is real backing and we cite it. It is also worth being clear about what it is not: the three documents the Fair asks for do not reach beyond the hall door. A CATTI certificate, a NAETI certificate, or a foreign-language degree from a mainland institution are its conditions for issuing a hall badge; a Foshan plant is not a hall, so that rule does not arrive there. Do not read that as "nobody will ask", though: your own audit standard, your company's supplier-access policy, or the plant's own site-access and confidentiality rules may each require something of the people you bring, and none of those are ours to interpret or to waive.

And the boundary on the other side: an interpreter interprets. They do not inspect, do not count stock, do not verify a certificate you were shown, and do not sign anything about what they saw. If you need findings you can rely on, that is an inspection body's job, and it is a separate booking.

8. If you want to meet at the booth first

Meeting at Pazhou and driving out afterwards is a reasonable plan, and whether it works depends on whether the supplier is actually there. In our data, 391 of the 594 Foshan exhibitors (65.8%) carry the "attended the 139th" flag (and as section 2 says, an absent flag does not mean an absent company). By district, with the 50 records that have no district in the last row:

Among the five named districts the order runs the wrong way from what you would want: Chancheng, the district with the lowest manufacturer share, has the highest share carrying the flag, and Shunde, with the highest manufacturer share, has the lowest. But on the reading section 2 sets out, this column measures whether the exhibition-history field was updated to the latest session rather than attendance, so take it as a weak signal at most: if your Shunde supplier has no 139th-session record with us, that means we do not know whether it went last time, not that it stays away. For this session there is still only one way to find out, and that is to ask them.

If you do want to bring an interpreter into the halls with you, the badge rules are the binding constraint and they are not lenient. As of 18 September 2026 the 140th session's accompanying-personnel notice has not been published. We scanned 1,200 items on the Fair's own content stream, covering 21 January to 17 September 2026 without a break. The range is deliberately long: it only means anything if it reaches back into April, because the 139th session's notice was published on 2 April — and that notice does turn up in what we scanned. So the method does catch this kind of document, and this time there was nothing to catch. Even so we cannot prove it does not exist somewhere else. One pattern to note and not to rely on: the 139th opened on 15 April and its notice appeared on 2 April, 13 days ahead; the 140th opens on 15 October. What follows is the 139th session's notice, and the 140th's rules may differ.

Under those 139th rules: only the overseas buyer can file the application, and the accompanying personnel cannot start one. The application must go in at least 2 calendar days ahead, and the notice works its own example — an application for attendance on 15 April had to be in no later than 13 April, which also shows you how the two days are counted. The accompanying person must hold a mainland Chinese resident identity card. They are registered either as an "assistant" or as an "interpreter", and an "interpreter" must additionally submit a CATTI certificate, a NAETI certificate, or a foreign-language degree from a mainland institution. On quota and cost, two clauses, quoted verbatim. The quota clause is 2 sentences:

每位采购商每期最多只能申请两位陪同人员，“助手”和“翻译”只能各一位。其中港澳台采购商和持中国护照的采购商不能申请“翻译”，只能申请“助手”。

The Fair published its own English of that clause, and we quote it rather than translating it ourselves:

Each buyer may apply for up to 2 accompanying personnel per phase, with a maximum of one interpreter and one assistant each. Buyers from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan as well as those holding a Chinese passport are not eligible to apply for an interpreter badge and can only apply for an assistant badge.

The fee clause is 1 sentence in Chinese:

证件费用为300元/天+50元工本费，已使用的证件不允许退款（已使用是指已被进馆闸机识别）。

The Fair's own English of the same clause runs to 2 sentences. That split is the English text's own, not ours:

A fee of RMB 300 per day plus a RMB 50 administrative fee will be charged. Used badges are non-refundable (a badge is considered used once it has been scanned by entry gates).

One difference in wording worth flagging. The Chinese deadline clause opens 需提前至少2个自然日提交申请 — our rendering: applications are required to be submitted at least 2 calendar days in advance. The Fair's own English of that sentence reads "Applications should be submitted at least 2 days in advance." The Chinese is the more specific of the two (it says calendar days) and the firmer (需 rather than "should"). In fairness, the Fair's English then works the example in its next sentence — "if attendance is planned for April 15, the application must be submitted no later than April 13" — which uses must and lands on exactly two calendar days, so both texts arrive at the same place. The difference is in the first sentence only. Plan against the Chinese.

Before you pick a person, read the two bars that stop a badge being issued at all. Clause 7 of the notice has two limbs and they do not have the same reach. The first says that anyone who has successfully obtained an exhibitor badge or an exhibitor-representative badge within the same phase of this session cannot obtain an overseas-buyer accompanying-personnel badge for that phase. The second says that anyone who has successfully obtained a move-in/move-out badge for this session, or who applied for an exhibitor or exhibitor-representative badge and was rejected, cannot obtain an accompanying-personnel badge for this session — note that the second limb covers the whole session, not just one phase. This is not abstract for you: every one of our 812 profiles lists trade-fair work among its settings, and an interpreter working in Guangzhou in October very plausibly has other fair engagements. So before you name somebody, ask them whether they have already obtained, or applied for, any other Canton Fair badge this session. Do not discover it on the second calendar day. Clause 6 adds one more: an accompanying person with irregularities in their badge history from previous sessions triggers an alert and must submit extra documents for review — and once that happens, two calendar days is not enough.

And one clause is aimed at you, not at the interpreter. Clause 8 states that the buyer and the accompanying person they apply for must have a genuine accompanying relationship; otherwise the Fair is entitled to confiscate the Canton Fair badges of both the buyer and the accompanying person and require them to leave, to place them on the Canton Fair badge blacklist, and not to refund the confiscated badge fees. Getting this wrong does not only cost the interpreter their badge; it costs you yours. The full clause and the name of the measures it invokes are in our badge piece.

If you have already missed the two calendar days. The notice provides no remedy and no exception for this, and we are not going to invent one. Three things can be said. First, you will most likely not get your interpreter into the halls that day, so plan on the assumption that you cannot. Second, the actual subject of this article — visiting a plant in Foshan — needs no Canton Fair badge of any kind, so moving the meeting outside the halls keeps the day usable. Third, whether any other route exists is a question only the Fair can answer; its phone and email are at the end of this section, and we do not speak for it.

Note the word phase in the quota clause. Two accompanying personnel is two per phase, not two for the fair. And note the second sentence if you hold a Chinese passport or are coming from Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan: the interpreter badge is not available to you at all, only the assistant badge. The consequences of getting this wrong, the black-list provision, and the full application procedure are in our Canton Fair interpreter badge piece — but the numbers above are here rather than behind that link on purpose, because a reader who has already missed the two-day deadline needs the number now, not a link.

One last point about money: the ¥300 per day plus ¥50 administrative fee is a badge fee paid to the Fair. It is not part of our interpreting quote, we do not collect it, and it is not among the separately itemised costs listed in section 9.

For anything about badges we are not the right people to ask, and the Fair publishes its own channels: its customer liaison centre on 4000-888-999 within China and (0086) 20-28888999 from outside, and info@cantonfair.org.cn. Whether a badge is issued is the Fair's decision and we do not speak for it.

9. The two questions from section 1, answered about ourselves

Section 1 tells you to ask your agency who pays for inter-city travel time and what the interpreter actually receives, and says that includes us. It would be cheap to write that and then not answer it. Of the two below, the first is an answer; the second is the most honest thing we can say, which is that we will not tell you — rather than a number we made up:

Who pays for the travel time to Foshan. We do not absorb it. A Guangzhou-to-Foshan day is quoted as a block that includes the travel either side, and transport, meals and any overnight stay are itemised separately rather than folded into an hourly figure. Our published starting rates are ¥200 per hour or ¥800 per full day for consecutive and escort interpreting, depending on language pair and subject, with half-day rates available — those are the listed rates on our FAQ page, they are a floor rather than a quote, and a cross-city day will not come in at the floor.

What the interpreter receives. We do not publish the split. That is a real answer, not an evasion: it is commercial terms between us and the interpreter, and we are not going to invent a number for an article. If the split matters to you — and for some buyers and some audit standards it genuinely does — ask before you book, and ask every agency you are comparing, not only us.

What we will not do. We are an intermediary; the quote covers the interpreter's fee plus our cost of screening them and carrying responsibility for the booking. We do not decide whether the plant lets you in, whether you may photograph the line, whether a badge is issued, or whether an audit passes. We do not provide legal or compliance advice, and if you need either, engage a qualified lawyer or the relevant certification body.

10. Sources and dates

• Our own Canton Fair exhibitor directory: built from the 139th-session exhibitor list (complete version, dated 16 April 2026), 26,270 companies, of which 594 are registered in Foshan. Every count in sections 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 is recomputed from that file. It has a companion file of contact details, not published, which does carry street addresses; this article quotes none of them, for the reason given in section 2.
• Our own interpreter records: 812 profiles, all registered in Guangzhou. Language, fair-category and qualification counts in section 7 come from that file.
• 《关于第140届中国进出口商品交易会出口展展位申请事宜的通告》, published 5 May 2026 on cantonfair.org.cn — the three phase dates in section 5, and Annex 1, which assigns each of the 54 zones to a phase. We found no official English version of this notice; the English in section 5 is labelled as our working translation.
• 《第140届广交会贸易服务展区招展通告》, published 4 September 2026 — the changeover dates quoted in section 5. We found no official English version of this one either; the English is our working translation.
• 《第139届广交会境外采购商陪同人员证件办理通知》, published 2 April 2026, and its official English version, Notice on Badge Application for Personnel Accompanying Overseas Buyers for the 139th Canton Fair — the quota, fee and eligibility rules in section 8. The Chinese and English are two separate published items; the English quoted in section 8 is the Fair's own, not ours.
• The check that no 140th-session accompanying-personnel notice exists: 1,200 items from the Fair's content list endpoint, covering 21 January to 17 September 2026 without a break, read on 18 September 2026. The 139th session's notice of 2 April 2026 appears in the same set, which is how we know the method reaches this kind of document.
• Our published interpreting rates: the FAQ page at /m/en/faq.

The product-name-to-zone keyword map used in section 5 is ours and not an official classification. The zone names and their phase assignments are the Fair's, copied verbatim from Annex 1.

Canton Fair rules change between sessions and the 140th session's own notices are still being published. Where this article quotes the 139th session, it says so. Check the Fair's own site before you rely on any of it.

If you are planning the Foshan day itself, our Guangzhou interpreters are listed at /m/en/interpreters/, filterable by language and by industry. To ask a question before you book, WhatsApp / WeChat on +86 139 2416 6640 reaches the same desk, and so does our contact page.