China seeks more sectors to cooperate with Israeli hi-tech startups

JERUSALEM - China is seeking more sectors to cooperate with Israel in high technology under the background of the "innovative comprehensive partnership" established between China and Israel.

This is the common sense reached among officials, entrepreneurs and experts from China and Israel, who attended the 6th China-Israel Hi-tech Investment Summit held Sunday in Haifa, northern coastal city of Israel.

China-Israel hi-tech cooperation has been further expanded from sectors such as agriculture, medicine and biology to leading-edge sectors such as life science, smart city, aging tech, robotics and 3D printing, according to them.

These foremost hi-tech sectors are also what Chinese and Israeli entrepreneurs at the summit are eager to cooperate in the near future. These sectors are also widely viewed as emerging ones with huge market potentials. Especially, aging technology is seen an important one to be developed in China where the population of old people is sharply increasing.

China and Israel are seeking full collaboration in hi-tech from the very beginning and the collaboration has mutual bases, said Yona Yahav, mayor of Haifa city in an interview with Xinhua.

"We enjoy every moment of this collaboration and this summit here shows that we have a good ground to enlarge the relations," Yahav noted.

Haifa is a center of hi-tech and also a center of universities, and has four sister cities in China, including Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Shantou.

That is why China and Israel are collaborating not only on business bases but also cultural bases, Yahav added.

While Chinese companies are hunting for cooperation opportunities in Israel, Israel is also now encouraging its hi-tech companies to go to China for more opportunities.

China's efforts of encouraging mass entrepreneurship and innovation became a hot topic at the summit. Experts deemed that these efforts are expected to create better opportunities for China and Israel to conduct much broader and deeper hi-tech cooperation.

It is a correct and wise action taken by China to push forward innovation and it is expected that the innovation environment would be greatly improved, said Dan Shechtman, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, and a professor of Israel Institute of Technology, told Xinhua.

"China is not only a huge manufacturing country and China will become a huge innovative country in the future," Shechtman believed.

China is doing very well and it is wonderful to see many Chinese delegations coming to Israel for hi-tech cooperation, Shechtman added.

It is recognized that about 200 delegates from China and Israel were attracted to attend the summit, organized by Messila, an Israeli startup mainly focusing on medical robotics which has raised about $30 million from China.

At the summit, Zhuhai-based Huafa Group signed a memorandum of understanding with Haifa Economic Corporation for future cooperation in the sectors of smart city and life science.

In Israel with the name of "nation of startups," expenditure on research and development accounted for 4.3 percent of its GDP in 2016, ranking the top in the world. Nowadays, about 6000 startups are running in the hi-tech field in Israel and about 300 R&D centers are under operation by international companies in the country.