The People’s Republic of China is the world’s fastest-growing economy. This is good news for Flanders, as it hopes to export its products and technologies to the land of the Great Wall. Take the Conférence, a Flemish delicacy that is new to the Chinese market and the first foreign-grown pear allowed on the Chinese mainland. The large pears can be preserved quite well, making them fit to survive a five-week boat transport. Some 400 million people on the Chinese east coast can expect to find them in local supermarkets soon.
An important focus point of the mission was environmental technology. The ways in which China’s economic progress has resulted in major environmental problems became very concrete, when prince Filip had to cancel a trip to Tianjijn because of smog. “I could never live here, but neither can the Chinese,” commented Gwen Declerck of economic daily De Tijd in her blog on the China mission. “Pollution kills 1.3 million inhabitants of Chinese cities every year.” Chinese authorities are starting to invest in green technologies – of the kind in which Flanders excels.
“Belgian eco solutions leading the way” the Federation of Enterprises in Belgium aptly let some 2.5 million readers of the English edition of the Chinese weekly The Economic Observer know in an eight-page supplement. One of the featured companies was Waterleau, based in Herent, Flemish Brabant, which built an incinerator in Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu province. The incinerator burns 300,000 tonnes of household waste, producing 18 megawatt of electricity. This waste-to-energy model has resulted in three new contracts with other cities, which were signed during the mission and which will in the future provide 250,000 Chinese families with “green power”.
“Why not innovate together, rather than act as competitors?” assert Peter Demuynck and Bert Mons of the technology federation Agoria in a statement. “In cooperating with China we can gain time in innovation processes because we can engage more engineers than we can find here. This way we also get access to one of the largest markets in world.”
Automotive is one of the areas where such a cooperation is possible. This industry represents 10% of Belgium’s industrial employment and 10% of the country’s total exports. Flanders is not only home to large assembly plants (Volvo, Ford) but also to an abundance of suppliers with often leading-edge technology.
And then there is – of course – Geely, the Chinese holding which acquired Volvo in 2010. Volvo Cars Ghent is Flanders’ largest passenger car plant, with a total staff of over 4,000 and an annual output of more than 200,000 cars. No wonder Flemish minister-president Kris Peeters, who had to cancel part of his trip because of the events surrounding the Dexia situation, arrived in time to meet Li Shufu, Geely’s chairman.
The Flemish government’s efforts with Volvo are extensive. It guaranteed a five-year loan worth €198 million to invest in new models to be built in Ghent and provided €2 million strategic training aid in 2010. Indirectly, the Flemish Region also supports Volvo through the innovation agency IWT and the competence centre Flanders’DRIVE, experts in electric and light weight vehicles. In a meeting with Peeters and prince Filip, Geely’s Li Shufu confirmed an interest in this country’s supplier base and to continue discussing mutual opportunities.
“The Chinese are very ambitious: ‘power train’, ‘lightweight’ and ‘electrification’ are the buzzwords,” says Bert Mons of Agoria Automotive. “This is music to the ears of the [local] companies on this mission. We came at the right moment. Belgian know-how can really take off here.”
Punch Powertrain, based in Sint-Truiden, is a success story in this respect. A producer of CVT transmissions and control units and CVT pulleys for passenger cars, it opened a new production line in its Nanjing plant, an investment of €8.5 million. In the Limburg headquarters, some 100 people are responsible for all of Punch Powertrain’s R&D. In China, the company, which has clients worldwide, employs 260 people in production.
On her blog, Declerck also recounts the downside of business in China. “When the party is almost over, and the business people are slightly intoxicated, the sad stories come out,” she writes. For this reason, the mission’s programme also included a seminar on intellectual property rights.
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