Web Summit founder says more Chinese companies ready to go overseas

Many Chinese companies and investors are ready to go abroad, said Paddy Cosgrave, founder of the two global technology conferences Web Summit and RISE, in Beijing on Wednesday.

When founders of Mobike and Ofo, the two largest bike-sharing players in China, spoke at Web Summit in November last year, the audience was astonished. "It was amazing," said Paddy. "It was really one of the product categories that was totally created in China and brought into the West."

Launched in 2010, Web Summit has become the largest technology conference in Europe and its Asia edition RISE will hold a fourth conference in Hong Kong on July 9-12.

"We are building a good platform to connect startups and investors, for both Chinese startups to foreign investors and Chinese investors to foreign startups," he added.

"All Chinese companies and investors that participate in the conferences have big interests in markets everywhere," Paddy said. "The conferences are also a platform for some Chinese companies to promote themselves and their brands in the international world. "

For example, in 2014 Shenzhen-based smartphone maker One Plus went to Web Summit in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, as a very small startup. The brand spread across Europe by winning the attention of Western journalists during the conference.

According to IDG data, One Plus was the No 1 luxury smartphone in the Indian market last quarter, beating both Apple and Samsung.

"I was born in the countryside with great sense of community, which is very different in cities," said Paddy.

With the idea of "community is everything", Web Summit and RISE emphasize both the 9 am to 5 pm period of conference and exhibitions and the 5 pm to 2 am period of drinking and meeting with people.

Up to 15,000 attendees from over 100 countries are expected to attend the event this year with top speakers including Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and ConsenSys.

RISE will have over 100 Chinese investors and 80 speakers onstage.

A new program of this year's RISE is "Runway to RISE", which gives an opportunity to early-stage startups – those that have raised less than $200,000 -- to expose themselves at RISE with a chance at becoming the winner of the breakthrough stage on the third day of the conference.

The program travels to Beijing on May 31 and Shanghai on June 5.