Interview: Slovenia looks to Chinese investors and tourists

Slovenia is expecting to have investment from and expand trade with China. Agreements have signed and more are in pipeline to achieve that, according to Andrej Vizjak, Slovenian Minister of Economy, in an exclusive interview with People's Daily Online during his visit to China on Monday Aug. 18.

There is no Chinese investment in Slovenia so far. On Aug. 15, a memorandum of understanding was signed between foreign investment authorities of Slovenia and China's Shanghai city to promote the two-way investment. The agreement was followed by a networking activity between 22 Slovenian companies and more than 170 Chinese business persons. The same event was also held in Beijing on Tuesday Aug. 19.

Mr. Vizjak said Chinese investors would be most welcome in logistics sector. Slovenia has built several economic and logistic zones which are seeking for partners globally.

Mr. Vizjak disclosed that a cooperation agreement between Slovenia's Luka Koper, the state-owned public limited company and China's Tianjin Port was expected to be signed next month in Koper, a very important port for the whole central Europe. Koper's Asian business enjoyed 50 percent annual growth in recent years, according to a data from China's Ministry of Commerce.

Other sectors that Mr. Vizjak believes to have the most potential of cooperation include auto parts, telecom, electronics, energy and environmental protection.

China is a big economy and Slovenia is small. But as an EU member in the euro zone, Slovenia is a gateway to central Europe. And it has a lot of experience in environmental protection and small hydropower plants that it can share with China, according to Mr. Vizjak.

Slovenian investors have made strong presence and are planning more in China, noted Mr. Vizjak. They have inputted 7.7 million euro on their China operation --- mainly in auto parts, components of vacuum cleaner, shoes --- and will build more production facilities for about 10 million euro in 2008 and 2009, focusing on cooling system, environmental protection, electronics and telecom. Such investment is quite big for Slovenian companies.

The forecast of Slovenia's economic growth is 5 percent in 2008, one percent lower than the 6 percent in 2007. "It is still high," said the minister, who is "no pessimist" about the impact of the slowdown in the EU economy over the first two quarters of the year.

"China is an extremely important trade partner of Slovenia," said Mr. Vizjak. Bilateral trade grew 40 percent in 2007 over 2006, with the surplus on China. Slovenia has high hopes on tourism. Chartered flights were launched this year between Slovenia and Japan to promote Slovenia as a tourism destination. "They are full in several days," said the Minister, hoping the same arrangement to be made between China and his country. Possibility of such arrangement has been discussed between airline operators from the two countries and a framework agreement is expected to be reached soon.

The demand for Chinese products in Europe is extremely high, said Mr. Vizjak. He is glad to see that the China-EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) and the updated 1985 China-EU economic and trade cooperation protocol --- both under negotiations --- would help achieve balanced trade through mutual market openness and effective intellectual property rights protection in China and EU.

He described his meeting with Chinese Minister of Commerce Chen Deming as extremely fruitful, covering all of those issues involving bilateral trade and investment, PCA, WTO. He extended his invitation to Minister Chen Deming to visit Slovenia.

It was Mr. Vizjak's second visit to China. The fist time he was here was in Nov. 2007 when Slovenian Primer Minister Janez Jansa visited China with a business delegation. In May this year, Slovenia received the biggest ever Chinese business delegation since the two countries established diplomatic relationship in 1992.

Source: People's Daily Online