Good news coming to the Hong Kong-macau Greater Bay Area

SHENZHEN Good news has been coming to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area since the beginning of 2023. On January 8, Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland resumed their quarantine-free cross-border travel after a three-year separation. A week later, the cross-border railway resumed its operations. In the latest development, the central government has scrapped all the remaining restrictions on cross-border travel, including COVID 19 testing and travel quotas, from Feb 6.

After going through a difficult time amid the Pandemic-induced economic sluggishness, enterprises in the southern region have finally seen light and are moving actively to embrace a strong bounceback of their business.

A bustling scene in a job fair in Shenzhen was seen in the first week after the Spring Festival holiday, with 64 well-known enterprises, including Chinese electric car maker BYD and cultural and tourism giant OCT Group, offering more than 2200 jobs.

The city is expected to organize 208 job fairs in the first quarter, with over 5,000 enterprises attending, according to Shenzhen's human resources and social security authority.

The Hong Kong chain restaurant Tam Chai Yunnan Noodles said it is going to hire more than 100 employees this year to fill basic positions such as waiters and chefs and management staff.

We currently operate 20 restaurants on the Chinese mainland. A person named Lin, who is in charge of employment, told local media that they plan to add 30 this year.

At a major job fair in Hong Kong on Thursday, the theme park hired 600 full-time and part-time staff as it prepares for the growing number of visitors as a result of the lifting of cross-border travel restrictions.

After the border reopening, it will continue to monitor the traffic flow to decide whether to recruit more or not.

Retail sales of Hong Kong and Macao are expected to grow by 15 percent year-on-year and that of Macao by up to 20 percent this year, according to a recent research report released by HSBC.

An executive at Express Luck Industrial Shenzhen Ltd, a Hong Kong-funded company in Shenzhen, said they are actively preparing to attend the Canton Fair and explore new orders from overseas.

She said that they have 10 production lines in operation, producing 15,000 LCD TVs per day. Our business is expected to grow by 10 percent year-on-year in the first half of the year due to the rebound in terminal devices and demand. Local governments of the mainland cities in the Greater Bay Area have set their GDP growth target for 2023 at 6 percent or above, except for Zhaoqing. In a recent talk with me, a senior executive of an electronic company in Shenzhen said that winter is over and spring has come. We are very positive and confident that this year will be a bumper harvest. She is based in Shenzhen and focuses on reporting on the emerging new economy, driven by tech innovations such as 5 G, big data, artificial intelligence, etc. There are some innovative and innovative businesses in the region.