The business talk and sales pitches see-sawed between English and Mandarin last week at the Hilton Rye Town. The 19-person delegation visiting Westchester County handed out bilingual business cards. China, fast transforming from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy, came courting businesses and investors here, and was courted in turn, at a technology cooperation seminar hosted by county officials.
“We have much to learn from each other,” County Executive Andrew J. Spano told the group of business and government officials from Beijing and Westchester. Spano and other county officials have traveled to China several times in the last decade to promote ties between Chinese and Westchester businesses. “It has never been easy to convince American companies here that they should be involved,” he said. “I think China is ahead of us in understanding that there should be global trade when it comes to small and mid-sized companies.”
“IT and software is already a global industry,” said Norman Jacknis, the county”™s chief information officer. “The question really is, what partnerships will get established around the world that will sell IT products to everybody else?”
Westchester County wants to create that partnership with Chinese companies, he said.
“We also know it takes a long time to build up relationships,” Jacknis said.
On the Chinese side, “They want to have some kind of cooperation with the Westchester companies,” Liang Jie, director of investment promotion at the Zhongguancun Haidian Science Park in Beijing”™s booming high-tech district, said through a translator. She added, though, that no Chinese companies were about to relocate here.
For a Chinese group to set up business here, “This is not a walk in the park,” said Salvatore J. Carrera, director of the county Office of Economic Development. Instead, county officials seek to foster working relationships and cooperative agreements on information technology and environmental issues between companies in China and existing businesses here, he said.
Getting here, however, was no walk in the park for some interested Chinese businesses. Representatives from six companies were denied visas by the U.S., visiting delegates said. Zhou Weimin, vice director general of the Beijing Investment Promotion Bureau, said only one of 20 Beijing companies planning to attend the conference was granted a visa.
“Hopefully in 2009 we”™ll be able to shake loose the bureaucracy,” the county”™s Jacknis said of the visa snafu.
“There are great business potentials in software and IT industries between Beijing and Westchester,” the delegation”™s head, Zhou Weimin, said in his sales pitch for foreign investment in China”™s capital. In Beijing, “Technological innovation is the machine that motivates economic development,” he said.
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Beijing”™s economic growth rate has been above 10 percent for eight consecutive years, he said. That has been strongly driven by its information, computer service and software industry, which grew at an annual average of nearly 17 percent from 2001 to 2005. The Beijing industry”™s total added value in 2006 amounted to $8.73 billion.
The visitors”™ sales pitch especially focused on the Zhongguancun Science Park and the surrounding Haidian district, which has been compared to both Silicon Valley and Westchester County. Haidian is the site of headquarters for the 2008 Olympic Games that, as Zhou Weimin said, “bring unprecedented opportunities for Beijing” to showcase its economic might. The science park, created in 1988 as China”™s first national high-tech zone, had an average annual growth rate of 27.7 percent from 1993 through 2006, according to Chinese officials.
“I know Westchester is very nice,” said Carol Qui, an investment promotion officer at the science park. “Haidian is very nice as well.” More than 200 Canadian firms and 957 American companies do business there. Ninety percent of the U.S. businesses are small and medium-sized companies, she said.
“If you”™re positioned in Haidian, you will be positioned for the world,” said Qui.
Both Westchester County and Haidian district have “very focused economies and surrounding wealth,” Spano said. “I think this is a very good fit.”
Shuang Chen, president and CEO of a small software company in Somers, was among several Westchester business executives looking for opportunities in the fast-growing Chinese market and possible Chinese IT products for their clients at last week”™s conference. A former IBM researcher, Shuang Chen started his privately held company, Op40, in 1999 and raised $20 million from investors.
“China is a big market for our technology,” he said. The company”™s leading software product, a distributed Internet server, was used in field tests in a 2004 pilot project for a high-speed passenger train system being developed by China”™s national railway. Chen said his company also works with a Chinese business partner to integrate Op40 technology into the partner”™s system.
“Technology export,” he said. “They have a need and they have a really fast-growing demand there.”
“China has probably the most advanced wireless network” in the world, he said, with 410 million wireless users, more than the entire U.S. population, in a nation of 1.4 billion people. “The wireless network environment is growing rapidly and it”™s already such a huge operation. For the use of our technology, the potential is great.”
Chen wants to raise another $5 million from investors to expand his company”™s operations and employment here and to open an office in Beijing. Some of that investment support could come from China, he said.
The CEO met Zhou Weimin, the Beijing investment official, at last week”™s conference. They arranged to meet in Beijing this week to discuss Chinese investment in Op40 and more business opportunities for Chen”™s company in Beijing.
“That meeting was a good gathering because otherwise I would never have connected with him,” Chen said.
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