The Guangdong-Hong Kong Business Fair for Co-operation in Trade and Culture kicked off in Hong Kong special administrative region on July 8th, with 469 trade, business and culture-related projects being represented by the visiting Guangdong delegation.

The fair was the highest-level ex-change between Guangdong and Hong Kong since Donald Tsang was elected chief executive of Hong Kong special administrative region. Executive Vice-Governor of Guangdong province, Tang Bingquan, who led the pro-vincial delegation to the fair said the cooperation between Guangdong and Hong Kong SAR would continue to yield benefits to both regions. And Donald Tsang said the cooperation projects would move ahead as scheduled.

The fair promoted 150 provincial investment projects and other trading opportunities in various aspects, including infrastructure construction, agriculture, light textile, electronic information, mechanism, chemical engineering, medication and tertiary industry.

The event concluded with the sig-nature of 469 projects at a total value of more than 3 billion USD in foreign investment, among which the con-tractual value was 2.5 billion USD. Total trading volume reached 2.72 billion USD with an export value of 1.98 billion USD and an import value of 0.75 billion USD.

A NEW FRONTIER

Improvements in the investment environment and the completion of a provincial expressway system covering 21 cities in this southern Chinese province have attracted Hong Kong investors to the mountainous areas as well as the eastern and western regions of Guangdong province. These are the newest hot spots for Hong Kong investors who in the past two decades only focused on the Pearl River Delta cities as their first choice of in-vestment.

A number of high-tech projects were also inked at the fair. The signed projects involving more than 10 million USD each totaled 159 in number. These projects accounted for 79 percent of the total foreign investment. The world's top 500 enterprises and their branches signed seven projects, with 56.3 million USD involved.

GUANGDONG-HONG KONG ECONOMIC TIES

The bilateral trade between Guang-dong and Hong Kong in the year 2004 increased by 23.3% compared with the year 2003.

Direct trade valued 74.5 bln USD in year 2004, up 25.8 percent and transit trade totaled 178.8 bln USD, up 22.3 percent.

In the first half of 2005, the actual direct investment of Hong Kong en-terprises in Guangdong has exceeded 100 bln USD.

Editor: Yan