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Policy Address 2024: Hong Kong to fund HK$1.5 billion for helping local start-ups and boosting technology development

Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu announced on Wednesday to raise HK$1.5 billion for Hong Kong start-ups and build Hong Kong as an international innovation and technology centre.

“We have eight measures to help SMEs, and I hope that Hong Kong will get better and better every day.”John Lee said at the media conference after the policy address.

The government will redeploy $1.5 billion to set up funds jointly with the market in start-ups of strategic industries to facilitate the local enterprise environment, according to John Lee’s latest policy address.

Meanwhile, the city’s top leader expanded Cyberport's Digital Transformation Support Pilot Programme to cover the retail, food and beverage, tourism, and personal services sectors, subsidising SMEs for digital transformation on a one-to-one matching basis.

“It is good for SMEs to have more financing channels, but the impact of these funds on SMEs is not significant,“ said Adrian Ho, a legislative council member concerned about the SMEs topic. “For matching funds, it's difficult for some people to access private sector investments.”

Similarly, Ting Pak-sun, the Chief Executive Officer of an IT start-up which received about HK$ 600,000 from the Cyberport Incubation Programme and different government programs, also agreed that it is an effective policy.

“Sponsored by government funds, SMEs like us can provide investors with some use cases to refer to,” Ting said.

The Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) had invested 44,858 million in the science and technology sector by Aug. 31. (Source: ITF website)

The Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), which aims to support local companies in upgrading their technology and developing innovative ideas, has helped around 75,881 projects by the end of August.

In 2023, local start-ups and their employees hit a historical high of 4,257 companies. (Source: Invest Hong Kong's start-ups survey)

However, Mars Zhou, the Chief Executive Officer of another intelligence company, also expressed his worries about the deployment method.

“Since it is not tough for start-ups to obtain incubation funds in Hong Kong, the government may spend a lot of money but to invest in some low-quality companies, ” Zhou said.

“Most of our funding was from the competition prizes of Cyberport and Hong Kong Science and Technology Park Corporation (HKSTP),” Zhou said

Adrain Ho cautioned that the policy may not help the company grow its turnover, although digital transformation can reduce costs and increase efficiency.

“Digitization is the future, but not a measure that can help retail SMEs, while boosting the economic environment can.”

“I hope that the government can give more support to SMEs because, in any sector of the economy, SMEs are the biggest driver of Hong Kong economy,” Ting said.

Li Zhengyuan, the founder of the Hong Kong KEWE International Educational in the educational industry, got the support of over HK$200,000 in approvals for website construction.

“We hope more policies can be issued for more humanities and social science enterprises, not only for technology and innovation companies,” Li said.

-The graphics are contributed by Chen Zhouyi.

《The Young Reporter》

The Young Reporter (TYR) started as a newspaper in 1969. Today, it is published across multiple media platforms and updated constantly to bring the latest news and analyses to its readers.

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