From Traditional Trade Exhibitions to Digital Trade Infrastructure: A Turning Point for Vietnamese Enterprises to Participate in Global Supply Chains

For decades, traditional trade fairs and exhibitions have been considered the primary trade promotion channel, playing a vital role in facilitating business connections and expanding export markets.

However, as global buyer sourcing behavior increasingly shifts toward digital environments, promotion models based on short-term events are beginning to reveal limitations in connection efficiency and the ability to sustain continuous trade flows.

According to Gartner, by 2025, up to 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will take place through digital channels. This indicates that international trade is no longer primarily conducted within a few days of exhibitions, but is transitioning toward a continuous connection model driven by data and real-time market demand.

From Traditional Trade Shows to AI-Powered Digital Trade Infrastructure

When Traditional Trade Fairs No Longer Provide Competitive Advantage

According to McKinsey & Company, approximately 70–80% of B2B procurement leaders now prefer digital interactions and conduct independent research before making connection decisions. This trend is fundamentally reshaping global sourcing behavior and placing traditional trade fair models under three major structural challenges:

First is the fragmentation of data after events. Most of the value generated from traditional exhibitions effectively ends once the event concludes. Buyer data and connection opportunities are not systematically organized, analyzed, or continuously tracked, resulting in many missed opportunities that fail to convert into actual transactions.

Second is the lack of precision in connections. Traditional models primarily optimize for reach, while the ability to match actual market demand remains limited. Businesses may connect with a large number of potential partners, but struggle to identify which buyers truly align with their capabilities and market direction.

Another issue is the rising cost of trade promotion with limited measurability. According to Oxford Economics, the cost of acquiring a new customer through traditional events can be significantly higher than through continuously operating digital trade platforms.

For Vietnam, where SMEs account for over 97% of total enterprises (according to the Ministry of Planning and Investment), optimizing trade promotion costs and improving market connection efficiency has become increasingly critical in the context of growing global competition.

From Trade Promotion Events to Digital Trade Infrastructure

Under Decision 1968/QĐ-TTg, the Prime Minister approved the program “Promoting the application of information technology and digital transformation in trade promotion activities for the 2021–2030 period,” setting a target that by 2030, 60% of trade fairs and exhibitions will be conducted on digital platforms. This is considered a key direction in the digital transformation roadmap for trade promotion.

However, from the perspective of technology and economic experts, digital transformation in trade promotion is not simply about digitizing documents or transferring physical booths into virtual environments (websites, VR/AR) for individual events.

The core lies in building a Digital Trade Infrastructure capable of continuous operation through data and AI.

If traditional trade fairs mainly create short-term “touchpoints,” digital trade infrastructure aims to maintain continuous trade connections 365 days a year, where enterprise data is continuously updated, analyzed, and leveraged to generate new connection opportunities after each event.

In this model, data is no longer just stored information but becomes the foundation for optimizing market connections, measuring trade promotion effectiveness, and expanding access to global buyers in real time.

According to Deloitte, data-driven organizations have significantly higher customer acquisition and retention capabilities compared to traditional models. This trend highlights that data and AI are increasingly becoming the new infrastructure layer of global trade.

Arobid V2.0 – AI-Driven Digital Trade Infrastructure

In this context, Arobid V2.0 is developed with the orientation of becoming a digital trade infrastructure that enables enterprises to connect with markets in a continuous, measurable, and AI-optimized manner.

Arobid V2.0 – AI-Driven Digital Trade Infrastructure

Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms that focus solely on transactions or organizing online events, this model aims to solve the core challenge of trade connection efficiency through three key infrastructure layers.

The B2B Marketplace serves as the data standardization layer, helping enterprises digitize and structure their supply capabilities according to B2B standards. This shortens the evaluation process for international buyers while reducing fragmented and inconsistent data—one of the major bottlenecks in current trade promotion activities.

Built on this data foundation, TradeXpo is a digital exhibition system designed to allow trade promotion organizations, industry associations, and business communities to operate continuous trade connection activities across sectors, markets, or geographic regions. This model enables enterprises to maintain a constant presence in the digital environment instead of appearing only during short-term events, while improving their ability to reach the right buyers based on real market data.

Meanwhile, AI Matching acts as the intelligent connection layer, leveraging global import-export data, industry insights, sourcing demand, and supply chain compatibility to analyze and recommend suitable partners—replacing the random connection approach of traditional models.

According to its development direction, this model not only serves individual enterprises but also enables the formation of digital trade ecosystems across industries, regions, and key export markets—operating continuously through data and AI, where trade promotion activities can be measured, analyzed, and optimized at scale.

The Future of Digital Trade Promotion and Data Governance Capability

In the 2026–2030 period, as the global economy enters a deeper phase of the AI era, the competitive advantage of a country or enterprise will no longer be determined solely by factory scale, production output, or low labor costs. The decisive factors will be data governance capability and the speed of real-time market connectivity.

The transition from traditional trade promotion models to digital trade infrastructure is not merely a technological or tool-based shift. It represents a fundamental transformation in the operational logic of the economy. For regulators and industry associations, digital infrastructure provides intuitive reporting tools to monitor market flows and make more precise policy decisions. For enterprises, it becomes a trade channel that reduces customer acquisition costs, maintains continuous market presence, and enables deeper integration into global value chains.

In this context, the development and adoption of large-scale digital trade infrastructures, such as Arobid V2.0, are no longer optional technological initiatives. They are becoming a critical component in shaping Vietnam’s strategic competitiveness on the global digital economy map.