12-16 October 2003, a UN Procurement Orientation Workshop had been successfully conducted respectively in Beijing, Guangzhou and Dongguan of China. 14 procurement officials from 11 UN agencies, UNDP, UNHCR, IAPSO, UNOPS, FAO, ILO, ICAO, UNICEF, UNU,DATA and UNIDO, presented at and address the Workshop with the topics about how to do business with UN agencies, such as categories, procedures approaches and registration to UN procurement, etc. UN officials also had very effective discussions with participating representatives from Chinese enterprises and visited China Export Commodity Fair.

　　Statistics show that procurement volume for UN agencies totaled US$4.5 billion in 2002, and procurement volume from China only accounted for 0.71 percent. But far more than this share of the purchased goods are made in China, which were mostly brought to UN from a third party, as the participating UN officials said. One of the main reasons for such a case is that Chinese enterprises have less knowledge of the UN procurement.

　　The participating enterprises expressed that they got a lot of useful information about how to do business with UN agencies from the Workshop. The UN procurement officials also have got a deeper understanding of Chinese enterprises and products.

　　The organizer of the Workshop, China International Center for Economic & Technical Exchanges (CICETE), decided to further promote the linkage between UN agencies and China's goods and service suppliers in the procurement respect.