Almost twenty thousand visitors streamed through the entrance to the sixteenth annual Royal FloraHolland, Trade Fair Aalsmeer. Held in early November, the three day event is above all a shop window for suppliers to the grower-owned sales and marketingco-operative, reports John Sutton.At the Fair around 20,000 products were on offer by nearly six hundred grower exhibitors. Of these, there were four hundred pot plant producers and two hundred cut flower growers. Although mainly Dutch, among the exhibitors there were also a significantnumber of Danish and Belgian suppliers. Together with almost five thousand other suppliers they support six auction sales markets, five in the Netherlands and one in Germany. A rapidly increasing proportion of sales - 58% last year - are now being negotiated directly between suppliers and customers via digital trading platforms, but still within the commercial and legal framework provided by FloraHolland. Currently there are on average over 140,000 seller-buyer transactions daily. Total sales for 2018 exceeded €4.6billion.
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