Integrating Hong Kong into National Development for Global Business Expansion and Economic Growth

CE's speech in delivering "The Chief Executive's 2025 Policy Address" to LegCo (5)

Chapter V

Integrate into the Overall National Development

77. As the world's second-largest economy, our country contributes more than one-third of global economic growth, representing the greatest opportunity for Hong Kong's development. We will fully integrate into the overall national development, capitalising on national strategies such as the GBA and high-quality co-operation under the B&R Initiative. In addition, this year is the preparatory year for the national 15th Five-Year Plan. Leveraging Hong Kong's unique advantages, we will contribute to the national development, and deepen international exchanges and co-operation by connecting with the Mainland and the world. We will also attract more enterprises to use Hong Kong to expand overseas, thereby creating business opportunities and economic returns.

(A) "Bringing in and Going Global": Hong Kong as a Platform for Overseas Expansion

78. China's external direct investment exceeded RMB 1 trillion last year, underscoring the growing global demand for "Made in China" products. Mainland enterprises are accelerating their pace to "go global".

79. With a shift in strategic focus, Mainland enterprises are proactively exploring emerging markets. The Government will capitalise on the advantages of Hong Kong as an export platform to unlock new areas for economic growth. Mainland enterprises going global can establish Corporate Treasury Centres (CTCs) and regional headquarters in Hong Kong for cross-boundary settlement, remittance, financing and related functions. They can also tap Hong Kong's professional high value-added supply chain services in fields such as accounting and law to help them explore overseas markets. In addition, they can leverage Hong Kong's strengths in marketing to connect with global buyers and build international brands.

80. In last year's Policy Address, I announced that we would develop Hong Kong into a high value-added supply chain service centre, attracting more enterprises to establish a presence in Hong Kong and expanding our headquarters economy. In 2024, Hong Kong was home to more than 1 400 regional headquarters of non-local enterprises, over 300 of which were from the Mainland.

81. I will establish a one-stop platform by mobilising Hong Kong's overseas offices, including those under InvestHK and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), as well as Hong Kong offices in the Mainland, and set up the Task Force on Supporting Mainland Enterprises in Going Global (GoGlobal Task Force) to encourage Mainland enterprises to use Hong Kong in expanding their businesses overseas. The Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development will steer the work of GoGlobal Task Force and co-ordinate various bureaux, departments and agencies in formulating proposals for enterprises looking to go global. Details are as follows:

(i) The HKMA will encourage the banking sector, especially banks in the Mainland, to establish regional headquarters in Hong Kong, where Hong Kong's strengths can help them expand into markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East, thereby providing more comprehensive cross-boundary financial solutions.

(ii) To attract more Mainland enterprises to establish CTCs in Hong Kong, we will complete a study on tax concessionary measures to be further enhanced in the first half of 2026.

(iii) The HKMA has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia to establish a US$1 billion new investment fund, catering to enterprises in Hong Kong and other GBA cities looking to expand into Saudi Arabia.

(iv) The HKMA will collaborate with organisations such as the Hong Kong Association of Banks, the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce and the Federation of Hong Kong Industries to lead delegations of banking representatives and SMEs to explore business opportunities in Southeast Asian markets such as Vietnam, pooling industry strengths to support the "going global" platform.

(v) The Government will leverage the strengths of Hong Kong's exhibition industry and consolidate our position as the ideal platform for Mainland brands to "go global" and for "bringing in" brands from around the world. We will also support the trade to organise more events conducive to brand development.

(vi) We will promote the development of carbon audit services to assist enterprises going global to meet international requirements and standards on green trade in respect of carbon emission reduction.

82. The Government will assist the local media to expand their network beyond Hong Kong, telling the good stories of Hong Kong.

(B) Deepen International Exchanges and Co-operation

83. We will actively invite the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to set up an office in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) will also deepen co-operation with Southeast Asian exchanges, attracting Southeast Asian issuers to seek secondary listings in Hong Kong and encouraging asset management companies to issue products in their local markets, thereby spurring asset allocation in our market.

84. The Belt and Road Office will co-ordinate local public organisations and institutes to help train the personnel of B&R countries. It will also strive for more opportunities to match commercial projects in B&R markets with Hong Kong professional service sectors.

85. We support our country to promote the participation in green co-operation with B&R countries by, among other things, jointly setting up a B&R Green Development Co-operation Platform in Hong Kong with the B&R Initiative International Green Development Coalition. The Environmental Protection Department will set up a B&R sustainable green development training centre in Hong Kong in 2026, providing training courses for the personnel of B&R countries. The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) will support the initiative with funding of $100 million. In addition, we will support local professional organisations⁵ to promote green building assessment tools among B&R countries.

86. The Government will invite members of the Silk Road Maritime Association⁶ to hold a summit during Hong Kong Maritime Week next year, promoting its participation in the B&R shipping brand.

87. This year and next, we will organise the World Internet Conference Asia-Pacific Summit and InnoEX; the inaugural Hong Kong Fixed Income and Currency Forum; the INTERPOL General Assembly; the GBA Conference on Inheritance, Innovation and Development of Traditional Chinese Medicine; the Association of National Olympic Committees General Assembly; the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education Conference and Exhibition; and the first Research Summit of the Research Grants Council. We will also establish the Hong Kong International Correctional Services Response Tactics Training Academy to enhance international exchanges and professional training. The Government will support local universities and professional organisations in their bids to host more international academic and professional conferences and publish influential academic journals. The Government will also participate in and promote I&T collaboration with various international and regional organisations, such as the International Organization for Standardization.

(C) Development of the Greater Bay Area

88. As one of its core cities, Hong Kong plays a vital role in driving the GBA's development. It also plays an irreplaceable part in our country's reform and opening up. The Government will continue to lead the entire community to dovetail with national strategies and integrate into the country's overall development in a more proactive manner. We will also strengthen mutually beneficial co-operation with Guangdong and Macao and deepen co-ordinated development.

89. We will continue to deepen our co-operation with Guangdong and Macao, forging closer convergence of our respective rules and mechanisms to enhance the flow of people, goods, data and capital. Relevant measures include:

(i) Develop the HKIA Dongguan Logistics Park. Upon security screening and cargo acceptance in Dongguan, Mainland cargo can be transported directly to the HKIA for transhipment, significantly reducing operating costs. This is the most successful model of GBA co-operation. Phase 1 development's permanent facilities will be completed in stages, starting from the end of this year. The preliminary study for Phase 2 development is also set to commence this year, including the introduction of more high value-added logistics and cross-boundary e-commerce facilities.

(ii) Promote a panel of GBA arbitrators and a platform for GBA commercial mediation and arbitration to lower enterprises' costs of cross-boundary dispute resolution.

(iii) Extend cross-boundary ambulance transfer arrangements with the governments of Guangdong and Macao, including two-way ambulance transfers and expansion to cover designated hospitals in Zhuhai and Nansha.

(iv) Enhance Cross-boundary Credit Referencing and the Shenzhen-Hong Kong cross-boundary data validation platform to facilitate Hong Kong banks' credit assessment of Mainland residents and enterprises in Hong Kong.

(v) Continuously enhance the Payment Connect, expanding to use cases for remittance related to people's livelihood. The Government will improve disbursement arrangements for portable cash assistance next year, so that Hong Kong elderly recipients retiring in Guangdong and Fujian Provinces may opt to receive Government assistance directly through their bank accounts with designated Mainland banks.

(vi) Work with exchanges in the GBA to develop commodity trading, carbon trading and other businesses. The HKEX, a controlling shareholder of the Qianhai Mercantile Exchange, will continue to strengthen mutual co-operation for the development of the offshore spot soybean market. Core Climate, the carbon marketplace of the HKEX, will collaborate with pilot carbon markets in the GBA to explore cross-boundary trade settlements on a trial basis.

(vii) Boost collaboration between the HKIC and the Guangdong Government to help Hong Kong's enterprises with high technology content, such as biotech and health tech start-ups, to strengthen cross-border industry chain development. Nansha will be the key base for the first phase.

(viii) The Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau (FSTB) is working with Shenzhen and Qianhai to promote digital finance development and support deeper integration of technology and finance between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Measures are expected to be announced later this year.

⁵The Hong Kong Green Building Council and the BEAM Society.

⁶The Silk Road Maritime Association was co-founded in 2018 by three large enterprises, the China COSCO Shipping Group, the Fujian Provincial Communication Transportation Group and the Xiamen Port Holding Group. The association aims to build an international integrated logistics service focused on shipping and foster economic and trade co-operation and development of countries and regions along the Maritime Silk Road. To date, the association has more than 330 members, including shipping companies, port enterprises, logistics companies and trade establishments, as well as members from upstream and downstream industries such as finance, insurance and technology.

(To be continued.)

Speech by FS at PolyU DBA 30th Anniversary Dinner

Following is the speech by the Financial Secretary, Mr Paul Chan, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) 30th Anniversary Dinner today (May 14):

Professor Jinguang Teng (President of PolyU, Professor Teng Jinguang), Professor Edwin Cheng (Dean of the Faculty of Business of PolyU), DBA alumni and students, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

Good evening. It is a pleasure to be here tonight to celebrate the 30th anniversary of PolyU's DBA programme. Founded in 1996, it was the first of its kind in Hong Kong - and it remains to this day the largest DBA community in this city and across the Mainland.

Building a community of scholar-leaders over three decades is no small feat. My warmest congratulations to everyone who has contributed to this achievement.

A DBA programme is an endeavour to bridge rigorous research with real-world practice, translating ideas into decisions that move businesses and societies forward. Tonight's theme - "From Ideas to Impact" - perfectly captures the spirit that has defined this programme from the very beginning.

I am particularly pleased to see that tonight's panel will explore how AI and Web3 are turning ideas into business and societal impact, with a focus spanning supply chain management, digital asset infrastructure and robotics. The breadth of that agenda reflects the true scope of the transformation before us - and it is a transformation we must confront with the utmost attention.

Technology and business transformation

Let's take a moment to reflect on how technology and innovation have transformed business and commerce.

Back to 1996 - the year this programme was born. The Internet was in its infancy. A mobile phone was the size of a water bottle. Data was a scarce resource. Business strategy was often about optimising within known boundaries: how to produce more efficiently, distribute more widely, price more competitively.

What we have witnessed since then is not incremental improvement, but the rewriting of the grammar of commerce. Consider these: we used to buy a CD; now we stream. We used to purchase software; now we subscribe. We used to own the things we relied on; but increasingly, ownership has evolved into a greater emphasis on getting access. Products have become platforms.

And value is no longer created solely within individual companies; it emerges across ecosystems, where capital, talent and data flow across organisational boundaries supported by interoperable systems, digitalisation and sophisticated logistics.

Profound challenges of AI era

Today, we have entered the age of AI - a moment more far-reaching and more disruptive than anything that came before. The challenge is no longer simply about adopting new tools. It is about recalibrating the way we think - and doing so with urgency.

First, AI is compressing the distance between insight and action. A strategist might once have spent months analysing market data before moving, but an AI agent today monitors market sentiment in real time, simulates scenarios and recommends courses of action or even has them executed - all at once. The bottleneck is no longer information, but our ability to direct machines with precision, and to verify and act on what they present.

Second, AI is redrawing the architecture of value chains. Middle layers that were justified by their ability to co-ordinate and process, are being compressed. At the same time, new intermediary roles are emerging - data curators, model trainers, compliance architects. I suspect many of you are quietly asking yourselves: in the new organisational structures that are taking shape, where do I stand? Will I still sit at a node that adds value?

For Hong Kong, these shifts carry particular weight. As an international financial centre and a super connector, our competitive edge has long rested on intermediation - in capital, information, markets and talent. AI will challenge each of these roles. But it also gives us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and move forward.

Opportunities we must seize together

This brings me to the core message I want to leave with you tonight. The opportunities ahead are enormous - but they will not materialise on their own. They require purposeful, co-ordinated action among the Government, business and academia. I want to highlight three areas where our collective leadership can make a decisive difference.

First, the digital workforce. The conversation about AI and jobs tends to focus on displacement - on what AI will take away. But that is only one side of the story. The more important question is what AI makes possible. Businesses need digital employees to scale what they do. Employees need digital assistants to keep them focused on what they do best. AI agents, if deployed well, can become a genuine extension of both. They can absorb the repetitive, the routine and the administrative, so that human energy can be directed to where it matters most: judgement, relationships and creative problem-solving.

But none of this works if the gains stay at the top. When AI doubles what a team can produce, the people who made that possible need to feel it - in their salaries, in their roles, in their prospects. That is how a virtuous cycle begins. Companies that share the gains through new skills, new responsibilities and better rewards will not just outperform their peers. They will be the ones that attract and keep the best people.

Second, the human-machine relationship. In the future, much of the information that companies produce - press releases, annual reports, regulatory filings, even research papers - may be written, processed and read primarily by AI systems, with humans as the secondary audience. When machines become the primary intermediaries of information between organisations, what matters is not just what you communicate, but whether your systems can communicate with theirs. Interoperability becomes the new baseline requirement.

But alongside that shift comes an equally important truth: distinctly human skills - curation, verification, ethical judgement - become more valuable, not less, precisely because they are what machines cannot be trusted to do alone. The question is whether our institutions, our training systems and our own habits can adapt quickly enough to ride on this development.

Third, AI literacy. We must treat AI literacy as a societal imperative. In this year's Budget, we outlined significant investment in computing infrastructure, the AI+ strategy and providing AI Training for All. But government effort alone will not be enough. We need a coalition of employers, educational institutions, professional bodies, business chambers and trade unions to build AI capability at every level of the workforce.

The history of technology tells us that the fruits of innovation tend to concentrate before they spread - accruing first to innovators and those who own capital, and reaching workers and communities only much later. The steam era followed that pattern. So did the early Internet. AI presents us with a rare opportunity to do better because it can empower even the ordinary people.

When a small business owner can deploy a digital agent to handle customer enquiries around the clock; when a nurse can spend less time on paperwork and more time at the bedside; when a teacher can tailor lessons to every student in the classroom - that is the moment productivity becomes prosperity. That is the transformation towards which we should build.

Concluding remarks

Ladies and gentlemen, 30 years ago, PolyU had the foresight to create a programme that would turn experienced executives into scholar-leaders - people who think critically, research rigorously and act decisively. That foresight is worth more today than it has ever been. The world does not lack ideas. What it often needs is the capacity to turn ideas into impact - to move from concept to execution, from pilot to scale, and from individual achievement to collective progress.

Tonight is therefore both a celebration and a call to action. A celebration of what this programme and its remarkable community have built across three decades; and a call to all of us to ensure that the transformation underway is pursued with ambition, guided by responsibility and designed to benefit the many, not just the few.

That is the future worth building - together.

Thank you very much.

Source: AI-found images