How Hong Kong is quietly contributing to China’s mighty tech rise – with a higher education push

Hong Kong has been quietly pumping new blood into China’s startup scene from its cluster of world-class higher education institutes. — SCMP

When robot enthusiast Andreas Widy decided to turn his underwater drone project from a lab in a Hong Kong university into a serious business, he waved goodbye to the city which he had called home for six years and headed north to China’s hi-tech hub Shenzhen.

“[In Hong Kong] shipments of materials [parts for the drones] could take one or two weeks ... And if there’s a mistake, then you need to redo it and wait another two weeks for a new one,” Widy, co-founder and CEO of underwater drone startup Navatics said in a recent interview in Shenzhen. “Moving the business to the mainland makes this [the supply chain] much faster.”