The Flanders-China Chamber of Commerce, the EU SME Center and the Province of East Flanders are organizing a one-day workshop on Digital Marketing Essentials for China to understand the current digital marketing developments and challenges in China and to be able to take advantage of the business opportunities for your business in this industry. The workshop provides latest business knowledge and practical solutions with cases to build a solid foundation for your future business development in China.

The seminar will be held on the 27 February 2018, from 09:00 – 17:30 at The House of the Province of East-Flanders, Gouvernementstraat 1, 9000 Gent. The language will be in English. At the end of the event, there will be a One on One Consultation session with the speaker.

About the speaker


Our guest for the seminar is Bjorn Hembre, Managing Director of Branditat. Bjorn has founded Branditat to support brands in navigating the cultural context. He has been a strategic design consultant with deep understanding of the user, the cultural and the business perspective of projects for over 11 years. With his background as an industrial designer, seeing things through the eyes of the user is the first priority. Bjorn has served as Experience Designer for Audi City – a new digital car showroom that supports premium automotive brands in their brand adaption for China. Furthermore, he helped to develop the digital sales process for various small and big companies in China and abroad.

Participation Fee:
• Members: 200 (Excl. VAT)
• Non-Members: 250 (Excl. VAT)

If you are interested to participate, please register before 24 February 2018 via this link.

China must press on with a “trinity” of reforms to fully realize an open economy, Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) for the last decade-and-a-half, told financial magazine Caijing in what could be one of his last major interviews in the job. He said China must embrace free trade and investment, let the market decide the yuan’s value, and scrap capital account controls, adding that the three elements were interlinked and could not be separated. “It’s very clear that they are conditional on each other and none of the three can be spared,” he was quoted as saying in the interview.

Zhou has designed and promoted a series of economic liberalizations over the last 15 years, including freeing up interest rates at home and giving the yuan a nominal international reserve currency status abroad. Zhou has now reached the unofficial retirement age for Chinese officials and could step down when the Communist Party convenes its five-yearly National Congress in Beijing this week.

Reflecting on China’s opening up since the early 1980s, Zhou said China’s position in the global economy was the result of a combination of the three liberalizations. “No country can create an open economy with heavy foreign exchange controls, and an exchange rate set under capital account controls won’t be a true market equilibrium rate,” he said.

Zhou’s advocacy of economic liberalization comes amid concerns at home about the risks of a freer exchange rate and flow of capital in the aftermath of a stock market rout and rapid capital outflows two years ago. As a result of those concerns, the central government has imposed capital account controls to stem outflows and intervened in the yuan exchange rate through a “countercyclical” factor. But Zhou said China should not wait for “conditions” to be ripe to free up the exchange rate system, nor should China drag its feet for fear of mistiming other reforms, the South China Morning Post reports.

China’s foreign exchange reserves hit an 11-month high of USD3.1 trillion at the end of September – rising for an eighth straight month – in a fresh sign of economic stability. The purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose to a five-year high last month, while retailers saw a double-digit increase in sales during the “Golden Week” holiday. But business activity in China’s services sector grew at its slowest pace in 21 months in September as the Caixin/Markit services purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 50.6 in September.

Some economists now expect Beijing may soon relax controls on outbound payments and individual foreign currency purchases. Caixin’s composite manufacturing and services PMI fell to 51.4 in September from 52.4 in August and was at the lowest level since June.

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Positive signs had emerged from China’s economy in recent months. Citing cooling capital outflows and improving trade, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Zhou Xiaochuan and various senior economic officials talked up the signals at the annual China Development Forum, a gathering in Beijing attended by foreign officials and top economists, including International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde. Zhang also told the forum that China was still alert to systemic risks in the financial and property markets. Zhou said capital outflows from China had eased because the market had become more “rational” about China’s economy and the yuan’s exchange rate after the jitters of previous months. Capital outflows are slowing significantly, Zhou said. China’s foreign exchange reserves fell USD28.5 billion in February to USD3.2 trillion. The drop narrowed sharply from the declines of around USD100 billion in December and January when the panic peaked about China’s slowing growth, the yuan’s depreciation and last year’s stock market rout. Zhang said economic indicators such as power consumption, employment and investment had improved since the start of the year until early this month. Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng said there were similar positive signs in foreign trade. After double-digit drops in exports and imports in the first two months, trade was expected to rebound strongly this month, the South China Morning Post reports.

The Flanders-China Chamber of Commerce (FCCC) is organizing a seminar focused on ‘How China is improving its foreign investment climate’. This event will take place on 28 May 2015 at 16 h. in Ghent (location to be determined).

The investment climate in China for foreign investors is undergoing profound and hopefully positive changes recently. In this presentation, Mr. REN Qing, partner of Zhonglun Law Firm, will share his insights about these changes and their implication for foreign investors and foreign invested enterprises, particularly covering:
(1) The draft Foreign Investment Law published in January 2015;
(2) The Catalogue of Industries for Guiding Foreign Investment revised in March 2015,
(3) The uniform Negative List applying to Shanhai, Guangdong, Tianjin and Fujian FTZs published in April 2015, and  
(4) The latest development of anti-trust enforcement in China, including the landmark Qualcomm case.
Mr. Ren Qing is a partner of Zhonglun Law Firm, specializing in M&A, anti-trust and trade law. Before joining Zhonglun, Mr. Ren was a deputy director at Department of Treaty & Law, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) of China, and once worked at Embassy of China in Belgium from 2009 to 2011.

Mr. Ren was invited by MOFCOM to participate in the preparation of the Draft Foreign Investment Law as an external expert. He has written a series of articles in Chinese and English to interpret the draft law since the draft law was published this January. Mr. Ren’s firm Zhonglun, recognized by Chambers Asia Pacific as PRC Law Firm of the year for 2014, also represented Qualcomm before the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in the landmark anti-trust case which was closed this February.

If you are interested in attending, please register online at www.flanders-china.be

Participation fee for FCCC members: €45, non-members: €75.