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Guangdong official: Hong Kong and province should integrate logistics

QI ZHENLI, an official from Economic and Information Commission of Guangdong province, said Guangdong and Hong Kong have gained greatly over 10 years' of cooperation on logistics in various aspects including traffic connection and streamline of customs clearance.

Mr Qi also pointed out that as regional and global free trade zones are increasing, Guangdong and Hong Kong should strengthen integration of their resources in logistics in the face of new challenges.

Mr Qi said on the recently held Asian Logistics and Maritime Conference in Hong Kong that since joining WTO, China's economic ties with the rest of the world are growing increasingly closer. Now many regional or global free trade zones across the global are emerging and have brought competition and challenges to China's economy. Under such circumstances, the logistics industry needs to think of a way to bring itself into full play.

Hong Kong is a free port while Guangdong has well-developed manufacturing industry. Though the two places are different in political system, they share the same advantages in geographical location and are complementary to each other, said Mr Qi.

Mr Qi said ten years ago, there were many weak links in the cooperation between Guangdong and Hong Kong that lower the efficiency of transportation of Guangdong-made products to the world, such as long transport time, limited portals, complicated procedures and the barriers caused by different ways of operation.

Now 10 years later, the efforts from both sides have led to substantial improvement. Like in the aspect of infrastructure, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge and the high-speed railway to West Kowloon, which is expected to open for traffic in 2017, will offer important support to the logistics industry. In the respect of customs clearance, customs of the two regions has built up a standard system for exchange of data and information, which greatly enhanced clearance efficiency.

Mr Qi said the focus of future cooperation between logistics industries of Guangdong and Hong Kong will be on electronic customs clearance and the shift of the target of supervision from cargo to shippers and freight forwarders.