MACAO, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- A total of 311 meetings, conferences and exhibitions were held in China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) in the third quarter this year, the SAR's statistics service said on Monday.

Information from the Statistics and Census Service indicated that among those events, there were 283 meetings and conferences, as well as 19 exhibitions and nine incentives. The number of participants and attendees rose by 19.9 percent to 697,000.

The overall average duration of the meetings and conferences went down by 0.1 day year-on-year to 1.4 days. The total floor area used dropped by 32.5 percent to 187,000 square meters. The overall average duration of the exhibitions was 3.3 days, down by 0.1 day year-on-year, and the total floor area used rose by 8.1 percent to 56,000 square meters.

The exhibitions in the third quarter attracted 1,503 exhibitors. Among them, 50.1 percent were from the Macao SAR and 21.3 percent from the Chinese mainland. Professional visitors totalled 25,000, and 71.8 percent of them were local residents.

Meanwhile, information from 878 interviewed exhibitors in the third quarter indicated that 94.6 percent of their receipts came from sales of products, whereas rental paid for exhibition booths accounted for 65.1 percent of their expenditure.