China entrepreneurs seek ties with more Israeli counterparts

JERUSALEM — China is seeking to cooperate with Israel in more high-tech sectors under the background of the “innovative comprehensive partnership” established between the two nations.

This was the common consensus reached among officials, entrepreneurs and experts from China and Israel, who attended the 6th ChinaIsrael Hi-tech Investment Summit held on Sunday in Haifa, a city on Israel’s northern coast.

China-Israel high-tech cooperation has been further expanded from sectors such as agriculture, medicine and biology to leading-edge areas such as life sciences, smart cities, elderly care, robotics and 3D printing.

These foremost high-tech sectors are areas in which Chinese and Israeli entrepreneurs at the summit are eager to cooperate on in the near future. These sectors are also widely viewed as emerging ones with huge market potential. Elderly care is seen an especially important sector for China, where the population of old people is sharply increasing.

China and Israel are seeking full collaboration in hightech from the very beginning and the collaboration has mutual bases, said Yona Yahav, mayor of Haifa, in an interview with Xinhua.

“We enjoy every moment of this collaboration and this summit here shows that we have a good ground to enlarge the relations,” Yahav noted.

Haifa is a center of hightech and also a center of universities, and has four sister cities in China: Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Shantou.

That is why China and Israel are collaborating not only on business bases but also cultural areas, Yahav added.

While Chinese companies are hunting for cooperation opportunities in Israel, Israel is also now encouraging its hightech companies to go to China for more opportunities.

China’s efforts of encouraging mass entrepreneurship and innovation became a hot topic at the summit. Experts believe these efforts are expected to create better opportunities for China and Israel to conduct much broader and deeper high-tech cooperation.

It is correct and wise for China to push forward innovation and it is expected that the innovation environment will be greatly improved, said Dan Shechtman, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, and a professor of Israel Institute of Technology.

“China is not only a huge manufacturing country ... China will become a huge innovative country in the future,” Shechtman said.

China is doing very well and it is wonderful to see many Chinese delegations coming to Israel for high-tech cooperation, Shechtman added.

About 200 delegates from China and Israel attended the summit, which was organized by Messila, an Israeli startup mainly focusing on medical robotics. It has raised about $30 million from China.

At the summit, Zhuhaibased Huafa Group signed a memorandum of understanding with Haifa Economic Corporation for future cooperation in the sectors of smart city and life science.

In Israel, which has been nicknamed the “nation of startups”, expenditure on research and development accounted for 4.3 percent of GDP in 2016, the world’s top such ranking. Nowadays, about 6,000 startups are operating in the high-tech field in Israel and about 300 R&D centers are under operation by international companies in the country.