THE Canton Fair, the world's largest trade exhibition, that starts this week in Guangzhou will go completely online as China's exporters grapple with a global slump in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The world's largest trade fair is going online, and the salespeople of Ningbo MH Industry, have been drafted in to livestreaming boot camp, reports Bloomberg News.

Carefully selected for English skills and winning personality, a few dozen budding influencers from the east-coast textile firm are being drilled to undergo an experiment unprecedented in the history of the Canton Fair.

The twice-annual trade meeting in Guangzhou usually sees more than 200,000 foreign buyers cram into its exhibition halls, but this year the coronavirus has made that impossible.

Instead, the government has hired Tencent Holdings to lay out a massive online livestream architecture to enable the same sort of interaction without the physical presence.

Spurred by the booming culture for live video merchandising in China, Canton Fair organisers went virtual, and it's for this that Ningbo MH's employees are training, with newly purchased video equipment, soft lighting and catchy welcome lines.

"With the lockdown everywhere in the world, we haven't met with any clients since January," said Wendy Ma, marketing manager at Ningbo MH. "We hope to tell them that we're still here and please don't forget us."