Plan your China sourcing for 2027: the calendar of buying, trade fairs and production

November and December are the months in which the whole of 2027 gets decided, and the reason is arithmetic rather than motivational. Chinese New Year 2027 falls on 6 February. Between placing an order and having the box on the shelf, 60 to 120 days go by. Put the two together and you will see that an order placed in January does not stock the first quarter: it stocks April.

This guide brings together what usually travels separately. China's production calendar, with the dates on which the line stops. The trade fair calendar, which decides when travelling is worth it. And the method of counting backwards from your selling season, which is the only one that produces an order date rather than an intention. It holds for buyers in any country, because the first two layers are Chinese and do not change with the destination.

You do not have one calendar, you have three

The mistake that produces the loss is almost never picking the wrong product. It is picking the right product and getting the month wrong. And that happens because the importer plans while looking at a single calendar, usually their own, and treats the other two as accidents.

The three work like this:

• The factory calendar. It rules the deadlines and is made of Chinese public holidays, high and low production season and raw material availability. It does not negotiate with you and it does not care about your date.
• The trade fair calendar. It rules when you can see, touch and compare suppliers in one place. It concentrates in April and October and sets the two natural travel windows of the year.
• Your own sales calendar. It rules what actually matters: the date on which the goods have to be available to whoever buys from you.

Planning consists of laying the three on top of each other and finding the dates on which they do not collide. When somebody says they were caught out by Chinese New Year, what happened was simpler: they laid the three on top of each other too late to change anything.

The rule that sums up this article: the factory calendar and the fair calendar are fixed and you change neither. The only one you control is the date on which you place the order. So that, and only that, is the decision to be planned.

The 60 to 120 days, opened up from the inside

The 60 to 120 day band between order and delivery is true, and it is useless while it stays that round. It hides the fact that the floor and the ceiling describe different operations, not the same order on good days and bad days.

The 60 days do exist, but only in one situation: a catalogue product, finished and in stock, shipped the week after payment. That is the replenishment purchase of somebody who already imports that item. It is not the purchase of somebody introducing a new product, who is precisely the one who most needs a reliable deadline.

Open up the full path of a made-to-order shipment and this is what appears:

Add up the minimums and you reach 75 days, not 60. Add up the maximums and you go past 170. The honest reading of the band is this: 120 days is the good average for a new order, not the ceiling, and anyone planning with 60 is planning with the number of an operation they do not yet have. The detail of each shipping stage is in the guide to freight from China to Brazil, and the last part of the path, which is the least predictable, in the guide on cargo held by customs.

The two 2027 shutdowns that are not negotiable

Of all the Chinese public holidays, two change the plan. The rest shift things by a few days and are absorbed by any schedule with a little slack.

The Spring Festival, 6 February

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February, and the eve, on 5 February, has been a statutory holiday since the 2025 revision. The holiday guaranteed by law runs for eight consecutive days. The factory, though, stops for a good deal longer: migrant workers travel before it and come back after it, and the restart is gradual because part of the team does not return and has to be replaced. In practice that means two to four weeks of manufacturing either idling or stopped. The full detail, with the whole year's holiday calendar, is in the guide to the Chinese public holidays of 2027.

For the 2027 plan, that means February is not a productive month and March is a month of unstable quality. Anyone who needs goods in the first quarter buys in November 2026. Anyone buying in January is buying for April.

The Golden Week, from 1 October

The second shutdown starts on 1 October, National Day, and usually runs to seven days off. It is far shorter than the first, but it lands at a worse moment: on top of the year-end shipping rush, when vessel space is already fought over and freight rates have already climbed. The practical effect is a two to three week push on any order whose shipment was set for early October.

Taken together, the two shutdowns remove close to six weeks of productive capacity from the year. That is not a small amount, and it is entirely predictable.

The trade fair calendar, and what it decides

A trade fair is neither a trip out nor an annual obligation. It is the only situation in which you compare ten suppliers of the same product on the same day, with the sample in your hand, without depending on a photograph. That is why it enters the plan as a buying decision, not as a journey.

The Chinese year has two axes, and everything else orbits them:

• The spring Canton Fair, which in 2027 is the 141st edition. The shape has been the same for decades: opening around 15 April, three five-day phases with a break between them, in Guangzhou. It is where you settle the range for the second half of the year.
• The autumn Canton Fair, around 15 October, in the same format. It is where you settle the following year, and it runs on into the Yiwu Fair, which takes place in the second half of October and covers small fast-moving items.

If your question is which of the three Canton Fair phases matches your product, the answer is in the guide on which phase to visit. If the question is fair versus factory city, it is worth reading the map of industrial clusters first, because for some products the more profitable trip is not to the fair, it is to the district where the thing is made.

Around those two axes sit the vertical fairs, which in 2027 fall mostly between February and June: beauty and cosmetics around February, sport and fitness and printing around March, plastics and machine tools around April, lighting and solar around June. The trade fair calendar carries the full map by vertical.

The operating rule that comes out of this is simple: the decision to attend a fair is taken eight to ten weeks in advance, which is the minimum for a visa, a sensibly priced flight, a hotel in the right city and an agenda booked with suppliers. For the Canton Fair of April 2027, that means deciding in February, which is exactly the month when China is shut and nobody answers email. Decide in January.

Count backwards, never forwards

Here is the method, and it fits in one sentence: the buying date is not chosen, it is calculated. You start from the date the goods have to be on sale and subtract the stages, one by one, until you reach the day on which the order has to be closed.

A concrete example. A summer product that has to be in store on 1 October 2027:

• Inland distribution and shelf replenishment: 2 weeks, so arrival at the port in mid-September.
• Customs clearance and delivery: 2 weeks, so berthing in early September.
• Ocean transit: 6 weeks, so shipment from China in mid-July.
• Consolidation, inspection and shipping queue: 3 weeks, so production finished by the end of June.
• Production: 6 weeks, so entry into the line in mid-May.
• Sample, sign-off and deposit: 3 weeks.

The order has to be closed by the end of April 2027, which is to say in the week the spring Canton Fair is taking place. Which is exactly the point: to sell in summer, the supplier had to have been chosen before the fair, or the fair had to be the place where you close, not the place where you start looking.

The hemisphere trap, which hardly anybody mentions

Chinese manufacturing organises its year around Christmas in the northern hemisphere. That is what the high production season between July and September exists for, that is what fills the vessels in September and October, and that is where most of a factory's export revenue comes from.

Anyone selling in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay or Uruguay has the year the other way round. And the result is a systematic mismatch, not a coincidence:

The two moments at which the southern hemisphere importer most needs the factory are the factory's two worst moments. That cannot be solved, but it can be anticipated: whoever knows it closes the summer order in May rather than in July, and pays less for making the same purchase three weeks earlier.

2027 month by month: what China does and what you do

This is the calendar to print out. On the left, what happens on the Chinese side. On the right, what that demands of you, if the aim is not to be caught out.

Notice what the table shows without saying it: there are four months in the year in which it makes sense to start a new production order, and they are March, May, June and December. The other eight are either shut, or full, or late. That is the real scarcity that planning administers.

The 2027 plan on a single page

If it all has to be reduced to a sequence of decisions, this is it.

01 List your selling dates, not your buying dates

Write down the three or four dates in the year on which the goods have to be available. They are the ones in charge. Everything else is a consequence.

02 Apply the backward calculation to each one

Use the stages in the lead time table and arrive at an order closing date for each selling date. Work with the long scenario, not the short one.

03 Mark the clashes against the Chinese calendar

Lay the dates you obtained over the two shutdowns and the fair weeks. Any date landing in February, in the first half of March or in the first week of October has to be brought forward.

04 Decide on travel in January, not in March

If April is part of the plan, the visa, the flight and the factory agenda get settled before Chinese New Year. After it, nobody on the other side answers for two weeks.

05 Keep the new supplier apart from the known one

A new product with a new supplier is the order that slips most, and it should never be scheduled for the tight window. Introduce new products in the loose months and use the peak months to replenish what already works. Before closing with somebody for the first time, the supplier verification routine saves more time than it costs.

06 Redo the plan in November

When the official holiday arrangement comes out, swap the estimates for the real dates and review whatever ended up tight. A plan made once a year and never revisited ages in three months.

What the calendar does not solve

It is worth saying plainly where planning ends, because a guide that promises to solve everything with a table is lying somewhere.

The calendar says when. It does not say whether the factory that promised the deadline actually has the capacity to meet it, nor whether your order really entered the line in the agreed week, nor whether the batch being packed is the one you approved as a sample. Those three things are only known up close, and that is where most delays are born: not in the public holiday, which is public, but in the gap between what was said by email and what is happening on the shop floor.

It is also why an order placed on the eve of Chinese New Year is so dangerous. It is not only the risk of slipping: it is that, if it slips, there is nobody on the other side to chase for three weeks. The conversation only restarts once the problem has already cost you the season.

Anyone with a presence on the ground turns each of those uncertainties into verified information: they confirm entry into the line, run the pre-shipment inspection, and chase the deadline in the factory's own language and time zone. The calendar stays yours. What changes is having somebody to enforce it on the other side.

BCVN — Brasil China Viagens e Negócios has connected Brazilian companies to the best suppliers in China and Asia since 2008. Find out about our services in commercial intermediation, quality inspection, factory audits and guided business trips to China's main trade fairs.

Seasonal products in the China Showcase

Real products from the Chinese trade fairs, each with its cost and resale logic. See more in the China Showcase.

Wine cooler → Sport fishing and light boating → Vinyl cutting plotter → Professional floor scrubber →

Keep reading