The MATRADE trade fair report
What the Market Development Grant needs from an organiser, and what this platform can and cannot give you.
If your exhibitors want to claim MATRADE's Market Development Grant (MDG), most of the work is yours, not theirs. This page is what the platform does about that — and, just as importantly, what it does not.
Figures and criteria here follow the MDG guidelines effective 1 March 2025. Confirm with MATRADE that no later revision applies before relying on them.
How the grant actually works
Each Malaysian SME exhibitor claims up to RM 5,000 for booth rental or participation fees. The organiser claims nothing.
But the organiser is the gate. MATRADE must receive an externally auditor-certified trade fair report in hardcopy within 30 calendar days of the last day. The guidelines are blunt about the consequence: failing which, the application from the exhibitors will be rejected.
So a perfectly-run event with no report means none of your exhibitors get anything.
Four things the platform cannot do for you
- MATRADE endorsement. The event has to be endorsed before it runs — Form R1 to register it, Form E1 to seek endorsement. Nothing here files those.
- Being a B2B event. Business-to-consumer and festival fairs are named as not eligible.
- Last year's audited report. The organiser checklist asks for the current and previous year's. A first edition does not have one.
- Total sales generated. That means business done at the fair. We cannot see it, and the report deliberately refuses to substitute ticket revenue for it.
What it does do
Studio → your event → Trade fair report computes every figure on ANNEX 2 from your own data, and answers the question that decides eligibility.
MATRADE accepts a fair held in Malaysia on gross space of at least 1,000 m² and at least one of:
- 20% of exhibitors foreign
- 20% of net space rented to foreign exhibitors
- 10% of visitors foreign trade visitors
The report marks each one met, not met, or not yet measurable.
What you have to enter
| Where | What |
|---|---|
| Details | Gross floor space in m², and which running of the fair this is |
| The report itself | Each exhibitor's country and net space |
| Nothing | Visitor country and trade-or-public — collected at registration |
Two rules the numbers follow
Unknown is a value. A visitor whose country was never asked is counted as unknown — never as Malaysian, never dropped. Both would move a percentage in the direction that flatters you, on a document an auditor signs.
A person is counted once. A delegate who booked three workshops has four registrations. The report counts people.
Start collecting early
Visitor country and trade-or-public are asked at registration and cannot be reconstructed afterwards. Nobody can be telephoned in November to ask which country they walked in from in October. The same is true of page views: the before-period only exists if the event page was live and counting.