Huaqiao International Service Business Park has taken several measures to develop its function as a financial base, which can be seen in the following methods.

Sustainable growth

As the only provincial development zone with the modern service industry as its supporting business, Huaqiao had no existing model at home to learn from. So the officials expanded their horizon to the world and gained vast experience and innovative ideas. In the development process, they stuck to the principle of planning before executing so as to ensure Huaqiao’s sustainable growth.

Dozens of famous planning corporations, including America’s Mckinsey & Company, Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute, Japan’s Nomura, Britain’s Atkins, and Singapore’s Start & City Planning, were invited to formulate the master plan and function programs, which laid a solid base for Huaqiao’s scientific development and basic infrastructure construction.

The underground space in the leading area, which covers 140 thousand square meters and consists of three lots, was developed as a whole and separated into several floors, which saves the cost of construction and reduces the number of entries and exits. Other underground spaces are also separated into several floors, which make full use of space resources.

Environmentally friendly low-consumption technologies are applied, such as solar energy, wind energy, and ground source heat pumps. The ground source heat pump used in Zhongyin International Business Park can save 30%～40% of the total energy used compared to traditional air-conditioners. The solar energy system for lighting is used in the parking lot and conference halls of the ecological park. In the core area, a cubic water circulating system is being set up to balance the water supply and storage.

From salon to booth

Huaqiao currently owns over 100 service programs, whose values are totaled to 40 billion yuan. Huaqiao held a special investment invitation salon beside the Huangpu River, located at Shanghai’s Financial Trade Zone of Lujiazui Area last December. The VIPs in Shanghai’s financial kingdom are invited to attend the conference. They held one-to-one talks with officials from the Huaqiao government. The representatives of the Bank of China Hong Kong holdings Co Ltd visited Huaqiao the next day and signed a cooperation contract with the China Data Group.

“Starting from this year, Huaqiao has held subsequent financial salons in Beijing and Hong Kong, which have brought in dozens of programs including the Global Data Solutions Limited, which inspired us to try a new investment style – booth.” said Wu Xinyi, director of the investment invitation bureau. Before the Global Data Solutions Limited, a group of financial BPO enterprises have moved in, such as China Data Group, Centrin Data Systems and Jiangsu Yuanyang Data Processing Co. Ltd, which formed a cluster effect.

Huaqiao held dozens of small sized booth investment invitations in Japan and European countries, which turned out to be more fruitful than salons.

China’s first Financial BPO Fund

Huaqiao Financial Service Outsourcing Fund, one-billion yuan’s worth dedicated to the emerging financial service outsourcing industry, was officially established on April 30, 2009. The Fund is China’s first stock equity investment fund exclusively serving the financial outsourcing business.

The fund adopts the company operating mode, and employs the Shanghai Ashe Capital Management Ltd, a professional institution with service outsourcing industrial resources and stock equity investment fund management experiences, for management.

Wang Ge, CEO of the Shanghai Ashe Capital Management Ltd, said, “The fund is composed of investments from the Kunshan Municipal Government and capital collected from the people by capital investment companies. The first stage of registered capital amounts to 200 million yuan, and the overall scale will reach one billion yuan. The Huaqiao Fund will take the form of stage-based equity participation and direct investment to supply financing services to service outsourcing enterprises in Huaqiao, support and expand the service outsourcing business in Huaqiao, and reap economic returns for investors.”

As an investor, the Kunshan Municipal Government pays greater attention to utilizing the Huaqiao Financial Service Outsourcing Fund to benefit itself to the modes of equity investment and international mergers and acquisitions, to enable the government to gain profits from the leverage effects with small amounts of capital, in order to attract more quality service outsourcing projects to concentrate in Huaqiao, to facilitate upgrading the Huaqiao service outsourcing industry, and to win social return.

The fund has gathered a group of elites for service outsourcing. It has accumulated more than one billion yuan for a service outsourcing project pool that covers multiple segmented service outsourcing fields, such as financial BPO, CRO, KPO, HRO, and supply chain management in and outside Huaqiao.

By Lucy