The French Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, where the outdoor floorboards were made of bamboo products from a Zhejiang company. Provided to China Daily

When visitors walked around the French Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo last year, many of them probably also stood on a part of Zhejiang province.

That is because the outdoor floorboards were made of bamboo provided by the Zhejiang Anji Huihuang Bamboo Products Co Ltd.

"Due to successful cooperation from the French project, we gained some recognition from our overseas clients and some of them began to order our products. It is just the first step in our internationalization process," says Wang Guangliang, the founder and general manager of the company.

Set up in 2002 with a registered capital of 1.1 million yuan (117,500 euros), the company, which has less than 60 employees, specializes in outdoor bamboo furnishings.

It raked in more than 10 million yuan in revenue last year, with more than 50 percent of the earnings coming from exports. Of those, 70 percent went to customers in Europe and the United States.

"This year, we plan to have more than 20 million yuan in sales revenue and about 70 to 80 percent of our products will be exported," Wang says.

The 50-year-old says it was only natural that he decided on developing bamboo products after his engineering classes in Shanghai Tongji University.

The plant is well known in Zhejiang, especially in Anji county, where there are more than 60,000 hectares of designated bamboo groves.

It is also an important part of Chinese aesthetics that feature prominently in the landscaping of the provincial capital Hangzhou, which draws countless visitors from home and abroad as a cultural center.

Wang established his company after his studies to use advanced technology to develop better bamboo products with a team of more than 10 people.

"Currently, there are at most three companies nationwide focusing on such outdoor bamboo furnishings and we possess leading technology to reprocess the material for such products," he says.

"With the development of China's economy and globalization, bamboo products will become increasingly popular."

Jiang Jianchun, a researcher with the China Academy of Forestry Science, says bamboo products hold a lot of potential in China because they are environmentally friendly.

"Compared with wood, bamboo is a kind of grass that grows much faster and is more easily recycled. The government is also providing more subsidies for these kinds of low-carbon industries," Jiang says.

But Wang says he is also faced with many challenges to promote the use of bamboo for building.

"First, requirements for outdoor bamboo furnishing are very high. For instance, the bamboo should be made waterproof so that it is more durable," he says.

Bamboo also has a high sugar content and can be damaged by worms, so maintaining its products requires more work, Wang says.

Finding skilled workers is another problem for him.

"This industry is labor intensive and the average wages are not high enough to attract workers. Our workers are far from enough," Wang says.

Despite these challenges, Wang is confident of the bamboo business and he is pushing ahead to establish his own brands.

"It's not easy since we don't have our own sales network overseas," he says.

"But we are working on it."