West tech founders offered chance to explore Hong Kong’s burgeoning tech ecosystem

By Peter Davison

17 October 2023

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Tech founders in the West of England have the chance to explore Hong Kong’s burgeoning tech ecosystem next month.

Tech West England Advocates (TWEA) is leading a trade mission - Mission to Hong Kong – Your Tech Gateway to Asia Pacific – from 13-17 November that is backed by a range of partners including Bristol & West of England China Bureau.

The event has been open for the last month to UK tech founders with export-ready technologies in areas including cleantech, healthtech, fintech, AI, robotics, regtech and SmartCity tech, and to investors and VCs.

Richard Lowe, founder of TWEA and mission organiser, says that Hong Kong’s tech sector has seen more than HKD$150 billion of investment since 2017.

“Besides its enduring commercial advantages, Hong Kong’s legendary spirit of enterprise and its boundless energy create the perfect environment for starting a business, and it is now a key tech innovation hub,” he said.

“If the UK is to remain globally competitive, through partnership and collaboration, we can work in harmony to innovate across Asia Pacific. Our biggest challenges are no longer local, they are global.”

Dianne Francombe OBE, chief executive of the Bristol & West of England China Bureau, added: “The Foreign Secretary’s recent visit to Beijing initiated a more positive UK-China dialogue and this mission represents an important opportunity for tech businesses in the West of England to be part of that conversation.”

The mission partners include InvestHK, Hong Kong Science & Technology Park, Cyberport, HKTDC, Hong Kong British Chamber of Commerce, Department for Business & Trade, British Consulate, Institute of Directors, Birmingham Tech, West of England and South West Institutes of Technology and TechSPARK.

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Tech West England Advocates is a not-for-profit organisation and one of 30-plus tech networks that make up Global Tech Advocates (GTA), the world's first truly international and inclusive grassroots tech community.

GTA connects tens of thousands of tech entrepreneurs, investors and experts together to support tech start-ups, scale ups and established tech companies to connect across its international tech ecosystem.

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.