Guangdong cities prime the pump as SAR startups head north for a future
With the blueprint for the high-profiled Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area set in motion, member cities of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) cluster have emerged as potential fertile grounds for Hong Kong entrepreneurs from a wide spectrum of the city's budding industries.
Victor Lo, Fung Leung and Mandy Tam are all young entrepreneurs born in the 1990s. They grew up in metropolitan Hong Kong, but have opted for one of the most unlikely careers in such a monstrous concrete jungle - farming.
It all came about when Lo was still an undergrad at the greenery encroached Chinese University of Hong Kong, attending to a 20-square-meter vegetable garden right in front of his dormitory - a project he and his two partners have never given up.
Now, they've managed to get hold of a plot of land about 20 times bigger than that Lo had at the university and on which he has hinged his career.
Lo aspires to be a farmer with a difference - using technology and planting by computer. To be specific, the trio eyes building the largest and most advanced aquaponics production base in China.
HK talents eye greener pastures in Bay Area
Aquaponics - a novel and green farming technique their startup is developing - refers to the combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (the soilless growing of plants). The environmentally-friendly and sustainable production method could realize a natural ecosystem and boost traditional farming efficiency.
The mainland, naturally, looks the logical choice as far as location is concerned for such a big farming enterprise. "After failing to find a right place in Hong Kong, we decided to try our luck on the mainland with its vast land resources," said Tam.
In 2016, the trio visited an agriculture innovation center in Jiangmen, a city on the west bank of the PRD and just a three-hour drive from Hong Kong. Jiangmen is among the nine-city cluster in Guangdong province that, along with the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, make up the Bay Area geared to rivaling the bay areas of New York, San Francisco and Tokyo when in full swing.
The Jiangmen plant, which happens to be working on soilless planting and seeking more modern farming projects, provided the Hong Kong startup a land parcel of 400 square meters for free and an initial fund of 50,000 yuan ($7693.75).
The center also has a fully equipped laboratory where Lo and his team could conduct all kinds of tests. "Our goal is to bring down the cost of producing organic vegetables by upgrading technology and management methods so that more people can afford green food," said Lo. He hopes Hong Kong people could be the first to taste the vegetables that are "grown by Hong Kong youths" on the mainland.
HK talents eye greener pastures in Bay Area
Their story has been an inspiration for many Hong Kong youths. Students from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Heung To Middle School and several other educational institutions have visited their project.
Moreover, 15 startups from Hong Kong and Macao had decided or were planning to move to Jiangmen to further incubate by late last year, according to local government officials. Jiangmen has gone to great lengths, with years of exchange activities, to polish up its name for entrepreneurs from both Hong Kong and Macao who are still relatively unfamiliar with the inner land city that has trailed well behind other Guangdong cities, notably Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, in terms of investment, infrastructure development or social amenities. Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai have attracted scores of Hong Kong startups on the strength of preferential policies in their free trade zones - Nansha, Qianhai and Hengqin - which have played a key motivating role.
Although other cities in Guangdong's Bay Area cluster - Foshan, Zhongshan, Dongguan, Zhaoqing and Huizhou - are also not as developed as Guangzhou or Shenzhen, their GDP growth rate still hovered around 7 to 8 percent last year. More importantly, they offer land and resource assets that are instrumental for various industries, attracting many Hong Kong investors.
As early as 2012, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation had set up an incubator jointly with the local government of Foshan, a small manufacturing center. Foshan is currently building "Hong Kong and Macao towns" to lure more startups from the two SARs, with a 200-million-yuan fund planned to be plowed into Hong Kong projects in three years.
Compared with Guangdong's free trade zones, hurdles to starting a business in these cities remain, such as disparate taxation systems and cultural differences. But, with the national planning of the Bay Area in top gear, an improvement in the situation may well be on the horizon.
Wang Fuqiang, director of the department of industrial planning at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, who took part in planning the Bay Area, said one major goal of the plan is to allow Hong Kong and Macao to be better integrated with Guangdong's industrial chains.
"To achieve that goal, we need to solve the problem of hardware and software inter-connection," he said in an interview with Guangzhou Daily.
Upcoming mega infrastructure projects, such as the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge and the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which are slated to open later this year, will pay an instrumental part in facilitating people-to-people exchanges, and the Bay Area could further strengthen logistics and financial links and bring about taxation reform and equal treatment for Hong Kong and Macao residents living and working in the Bay Area.
