Standing inside a pavilion in the vast exhibition center in Beijing, Jonathan Lee exchanged his business card with everyone who stopped by the product booth of his company.

A satellite antenna was placed at the front of the pavilion.

"Our product is among the top three of its kind in the global marketplace," said Lee, who works for C-Com Satellite System Inc., a Canadian company that makes mobile satellite antennas. The company is based in Ontario.

As director of sales for the company's Asia Pacific Region, Lee represented his company at the 16th annual China International Petroleum & Petrochemical Technology and Equipment Exhibition. The event was held from March 23 to 25 at the New China International Exhibition in Beijing.

The exhibition, said to be the largest in the world, attracted 1,800 exhibitors from 65 countries and regions, including Canadian companies from Ontario and Alberta, Canada's most innovative and petroleum resourceful provinces.

The Canadian companies, most of which provide technologies and solutions to improve production efficiency and safety in the petroleum and petrochemical business, are longing to gain a foothold in China, a fast-growing and key target market for Canada's energy strategy shifting from North America to Asia.

Having sold over 1,500 satellite antennas to China's civil defense sectors, including providing telecommunication signals in the earthquake-affected areas in Sichuan and Yunnan, Lee said his company is aiming at Chinese oil companies as potential clients, which would use the satellite antennas to bring their remote oilfields under intelligent management.

"This is a unique technology with a niche market, therefore we must go global," said Lee, speaking in mandarin. "The robust innovation environment in Canada is one of the main reasons that motivates China's telecom-equipment giant Huawei, which set up headquarters in Ottawa and continuously invests in its R&D power."

Intelligent property has become one of the most pressing issues of Canadian technology companies entering the Chinese markets

"Our products have encountered local competitors and some IP infringement in China," said Arthur Chow, a regional representative in China for Master Flo Valve Inc., a Canadian company headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, which designs and manufactures choke valves and actuators for the world's leading oil and gas companies.

"But the quality of our products have won trust from our customers from Chinese oil and gas industries, where the operational efficiency and safety are valued as equal as the production capacity nowadays," said Chow.

As oil prices keep plunging, for the global players in the business big and small, cost control has become the crucial way to survive in the downturn. The technologies, which can be applied to improve the operational and management efficiencies of the industries, are increasingly needed everywhere in the world. China is not an exception.

"The global oil industries have realized the importance of upgrading the management system to reduce cost. Even in the US, most of the oilfields however are still operating in the old ways as the early days," said Leigh Chang, vice president of Redline Communications, a Canadian company providing information management technologies and solutions for global energy industries.

"For example, it is still a conventional way to send workers to check the working conditions of the beam pumping units in the oilfields," said Chang.

Some Canadian companies in the fields are more aggressive with their ambitions to expand their business in China.

Mirus International Inc., a company from Brampton, Ontario, acquired an operational factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu province in China last year to produce harmonic filters, transformers and other power quality improvement equipment and solutions.

Paul Hoevenaars, the company's program manager of China Operations, was confident that their uniquely designed product could help Chinese oil and gas companies to improve operational efficiency by saving energy and reducing cost.

The technology and information cooperation between petroleum industries in China and Canada, is meeting an 'unprecedented opportunity', said Han Hua, managing director of China-Alberta Petroleum Center (CAPC), a service organization jointly invested and operated by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the government of Alberta, Canada.

The organization was founded in 1989.

wangru@chinadaily.com.cn