Hong Kong safer for trading than China
Written by Writer on Monday, October 13th, 2008
Hong Kong safer for trading than China
WELSH businesses looking for cheap manufacturing opportunities in the Far East would do well to consider Hong Kong as a safer alternative than mainland China, according to a representative from the former colony.
Sarah Wu, director general of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, said that even some Chinese businesses were transferring their manufacturing activities to Hong Kong because of the greater protection for intellectual property rights there.
She added that Chinese manufacturing suffered from a high proportion of fakes and that bearing the Made in Hong Kong label gave an assurance of superior quality control.
Some Chinese manufacturers of high-quality products, such as medicines, were basing their activities in Hong Kong to take advantage of its reputation for higher quality assurance before shipping back to the Chinese market.
Miss Wu also pointed out that Hong Kong was a popular location for businesses to base their regional headquarters, because of its easy access to China, Japan and other Far Eastern locations.
But she had bad news for promoters of Cardiff airport, arguing that it was extremely unlikely that Chinese business travellers would choose to fly there instead of Heathrow.
She said she thought Far Eastern visitors would always prefer to fly to a hub like Heathrow or Schiphol and then travel on to Cardiff by short haul flight or high-speed rail.
She contrasted the poor transport infrastructure around British airports with the ease of travelling from Hong Kong’s airport, built on an island, to the city.
Ms Wu was visiting Cardiff this week for talks with Welsh political and business leaders about the business opportunities in the former colony, now a Special Administrative Region of China.
She said she was particularly interested in meeting people from Wales’ creative industries.
Hong Kong, a British colony from 1842, was reunited with China in 1997. Under the One Country, Two Systems principle, it is guaranteed a high degree of autonomy in economic and trade matters, and continues to practise as a free market economy with separate trading arrangements to the rest of China.
Hong Kong suffered from the collapse in Far Eastern economies in the years immediately after 1997, but in recent years has seen a resurgence, with GDP growing by 6.3% in 2007.
Manufacturing, for which the city was once a byword, is a relatively small part of its economy now, with import and export trade, wholesale and retail and real estate and business services now being the largest sectors.
The EU was Hong Kong’s second largest trading partner in 2007 after mainland China.
Total bilateral trade amounted to 53.1bn euros, with the UK coming second behind Germany with an 18% share of the city’s trade with Europe.
More than 400 EU companies have regional headquarters in Hong Kong, while another 500 have regional or local offices.
Inward investment into Hong Kong from the UK amounted to 10bn euro in 2006, making Britain the second largest investor among EU member states.
