Hong Kong Businesses Eye Investments in Primorsky Krai

Jun. 1 – The Hong Kong business community, led by the Financial Secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region John Tsang, participated in the Vladivostok investment conference last week.

“We are here to strengthen collaboration between the two nations. This particular region of Russia has huge natural resources…we have to use these advantages for our mutual benefits,” Tsang said to local media.

“We need to cooperate with each other. I’ll give you one example. 20 percent of world timber resources lies in Russia but contributes to only 2 percent of the global population. In China we have just 5 percent of worldwide timber, but 20 percent of global inhabitants. Well, you can make your conclusions keeping this in mind,” said one of the delegation members.

There were 30 businessmen in the delegation representing the largest commerce associations and private enterprises and had come to Vladivostok on an invitation by Russian vice-primer and Minister of Finance Aleksey Kudrin.

The move was seen as a step towards improving relations between the Russian government and Chinese business.

“The federal government authorities are very mistrustful of Chinese investments in Far East mining products processing and in large infrastructure development projects due to political reasons,” local government officials said to weekly Kommersant-Khabarovsk.

He added, that “at the same time they are willingly allowing Chinese businesses to enter in trade and small projects in other spheres only.”

Hong Kong businessmen are ready to break this barrier to quickly develop Vladivostok city, which will host the 24th Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in 2012.

“Judging from city roads and building conditions, there is big potential for investments. If we create a chain of Hong Kong capital and cheap Chinese labor, we will be able to develop the city,” the member of the delegation said.