BEIJING, July 20(ABC): Pakistan Ambassador to China, Moinul Haque has invited the Chinese technology enterprises to come and visit Pakistan and explore the country for their future businesses and investment and asked them to take advantage of incentives being offered by the government.
“We are promoting establishment of Chinese industries, manufacturing units in special economic and technologies zones and facilitating their exports also beyond Pakistan to the neighbouring regions,” he made these remarks while addressing the participants of China Pakistan Technology Investment Conference.
Special Technology Zone Authority (STZA) hosted the conference in collaboration with Pakistan Embassy in Beijing. Ambassador Haque said that Pakistan’s young population presents a great potential and opportunities for the Chinese companies to establish their businesses in Pakistan and use huge skilled human resource in the field of IT and software development.
Pakistan can also serve as a very important regional hub for the Chinese companies to do business with the Central Asia, Middle East and onwards to Africa, he added. He said that the Chinese enterprises were being offered special incentives and tax rebates as well as other facilities to set up their businesses. Ambassador Haque mentioned the presence of a number of Chinese technologies companies particularly Huawei which have a very old association and important business with Pakistan.
He pointed out that other Chinese companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, ZTE, Oppo and Haier as well as automobile and electric vehicle manufacturing companies were now looking Pakistan as their future investment destination. While highlighting the special and unique nature of the China-Pakistan friendship, he said that it was an all-weather strategic partnership and iron brotherhood, which has been nurtured over the years by successive generations of our leaders and people, adding, this relationship is deeply rooted in the hearts of our people.
He remarked that cooperation between the two countries in the areas of trade, investment and technology has become a very important part of bilateral agenda and one of the manifestation of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is the flagship project of President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative.
He said the two countries have already constituted a joint working group on science and technology. Last year, both countries also established a new working group in the field of information technology, which would give a strong boost to our cooperation in the areas of, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, bio medical engineering, smart industries, and semiconductor industry as well.
“We have also established China-Pakistan digital corridor with the aim to promote and strengthen our cooperation in the field of digitalization and emerging technologies,” he added. While appreciating China’s progress in the field of science and technology and IT, he said that China was now leading in many new technologies and “We will be very keen to develop a close relationship with Chinese state institutions and private sector and we are learning from Chinese expertise and experience in these fields”, he said.
Ambassador Haque said that the two countries were also promoting very close collaboration besides the technology companies, the Chinese technology universities and “we are very grateful to many Chinese universities for helping Pakistan in the field of academics and research”, he said.
He termed the holding of conference very important first step towards strengthening China-Pakistan cooperation in IT sector and expressed the confidence that it would be able to bring forward new ideas and very important suggestions promote cooperation and bring investments.
He also assured the participants of his full support for making this cooperation more productive, fruitful and win win for both countries. Chairman, STZA, Amer Hashmi delivered a keynote address while Cao Zhouhua, First Secretary, Chinese Embassy in Pakistan and officials of STZA also spoke on the occasion.
It may be mentioned that the conference was a great success as nearly 1000 enterprises and companies joined it. The conference aimed to target collaboration in the areas of technology, academics, research, and skill development programs.