HONG KONG: In recent years, Hong Kong has become an entrepreneur’s stomping ground, going from a few hundred startups to more than 2,000, Hong Kong’s trade representative to the United States says. Clement Leung, Hong Kong’s Washington, D.C.-based commissioner for economic and trade affairs/U.S., was in Denver last week on a three-day tour of the metro area which included meeting with business leaders and local and state elected officials. While beef is a big import for Hong Kong, Leung was touting Hong Kong as a place for startups to flourish. “We are seeing deal flows,” he said. “The attraction is proximity to a big market, with 70 percent mobile penetration. So if you are doing apps, you want to be in that space.”
Entrepreneurs have discovered that Hong Kong has a robust and international financial center and is close to China’s Shenzhen manufacturing hub of electronics, said Leung, who directs Hong Kong’s government efforts in promoting U.S. and Hong Kong economic trade ties. “So, if you are making devices and want to assemble a prototype quickly to prove the concept to investors — anything you can get from this planet, you can get from this [Shenzhen] manufacturing cluster,” he said. It seems American entrepreneurs have discovered Hong Kong. About half of Hong Kong’s startups are from outside of Hong Kong. “And, the U.S. is the biggest group of foreign entrepreneurs we have,” he said. Hong Kong, a former British colony, became part of China in 1997 as a “special administrative region,” but enjoys a high degree of autonomy and a separate mission, Leung said. “Under the one-country, two-systems arrangement, we have our own bilateral relationship with our main trading partners — for example, the United States.” Hong Kong bought about $35 billion in goods from the Unites States last year, and of that about $200 million was purchased from Colorado companies. It is among the few Asian trade partners that allow bone-in beef and has become the No. 5 market for U.S. beef exports.
