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Leading business minds say that Hong Kong must leverage its global reach as the mainland develops a new financial centre in Shenzhen Hong Kong must leverage its international reach if it is to avoid being marginalised by the mainland’s march towards full financial sector liberalisation and further integration into the global monetary system, according to a panel of experts assembled by the South China Morning Post.新蒲崗迷你倉 “China’s opening up means there is more, potentially, for everyone,” said Anita Fung, the chief executive of HSBC in Hong Kong. “The real threat is to be complacent about it.” Speaking to about 150 senior executives drawn from across Hong Kong’s economic spectrum, Fung was part of a high-level panel brought together by the Post to kick off a series of six seminars to engage the city’s business leaders and top thinkers under the banner of “Redefining Hong Kong”. The first seminar focused on how Hong Kong could benefit from the evolution of Qianhai, the special economic zone in the west of Shenzhen that will lead the mainland’s drive for a modern services sector – particularly in financial services and, significantly, in the liberalisation and internationalisation of the yuan. Qianhai, which aims to raise US$7 billion of inward investment from 30 of the world’s top 500 companies in its 2013-15 development phase, is regarded as a potential threat to Hong Kong’s supremacy as the international financing centre for the world’s second-biggest economy. Analysts reason that once the mainland’s capital account is liberalised and the yuan fully convertible, Beijing’s need for Hong Kong disappears. Hong Kong settled about 80 per cent of all yuan-denominated trade in April – at an annual pace in excess of 350 billion yuan (HK$442 billion) – and is the location of choice for businesses and individuals to deposit offshore holdings of the currency, totalling about 700 billion yuan at the end of May. With a stock market capitalisation of US$2.8 trillion at the end of last year that kept it ahead of Shanghai’s US$2.5 trillion, Hong Kong has been the main route through which mainland corporates have accessed international capital markets for two decades. Fung disagrees with the downbeat analysis and says the bigger risks are in ignoring that a more economically open China hamini storage already brought benefits to global trade and misunderstanding the role that Hong Kong, as the mainland’s offshore financial centre, will play long term. “We have to behave like an offshore centre,” she said. “We need to be more adventurous.” That advice should be heeded beyond the financial services sector, says Nicholas Kwan, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council’s director of research. Kwan said the Qianhai zone was created to drive six sectors of the services industry – finance, tax, legal, human resources, education and telecommunications. Meanwhile, Beijing’s policy of economic rebalancing away from manufacturing for export to driving growth through domestic consumption necessarily had the services industry at its core. “The depth and breadth of what’s needed should not be ignored,” Kwan said. Hong Kong is a net exporter of services. It sold US$127.7 billion worth of them last year, about 48 per cent of GDP, and recorded an overall services surplus of US$69.7 billion. Those figures make Hong Kong one of the most successful service economies – expertise that Beijing must tap into if it is to recalibrate the economic engine. Services account for about 80 per cent of GDP in the United States, but only 40 per cent of China’s GDP, according to data from the World Bank. Rebalancing those numbers implies a massive opportunity nationally for firms in the services sector, particularly those with niche expertise that mainland companies lack. Thomas Lee, the chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Insurers, pointed to the potential for Qianhai to create a wave of “captive” insurance vehicles for major firms that can take advantage of lower taxes and easier cross-border capital movements. Captives are entities owned and funded by corporations to self-insure risks, instead of buying traditional protection. They are typically based in low-tax environments. Qianhai’s tax rate will be set at 15 per cent. The official mainland corporate tax rate is 25 per cent. Sally Wong, the chief executive of the Hong Kong Investment Funds Association, said the city’s global expertise would be vital to its future, regardless of the size of the potential mainland market. “The mainland dimension of course is crucial, but of equal importance is the international dimension of the city,” she said. self storage