Mobility Goes International with a Mission to China and Singapore!!

Submitted by Silvana Sanfe… on 15 October 2019

From the 5th to 12th September 2019, MobiGoIn-Action internationalisation programme took the selected companies to two fascinating markets: China and Singapore.

The companies participating (TruPhysics GmbH and Capte B.V) had a very busy schedule during this 7 full days. The mission was led by 2 of the MobiGoIn-Action Clusters: bwcon (which organised everything with the support of ENRICH CHINA) and Mov'eo.

Starting in Ningbo, Smart city leader and 5G pilot city, the companies had the chance to participate in the 9th Smart City and Intelligent Economy Expo China and the Global Digital Economy Forum. A great opportunity for them to approach the Chinese business culture and to understand the countries priorities and strengths. 

Other highlight of the Chinese mission was the visit to Geely. Despite the fact that this name is not well known in Europe, Geely is actually a very big player in car manufacturing that bought Volvo Cars a few years ago. They sold over 1.5 million cars in 2018 and are mostly present on the Chinese market (which offers indeed a very large panel of consumers !). Their R&D in autonomous as well as electric cars impressed all the delegation. 

Shanghai had another surprise in store for the delegation: the visit to ComNavTech, developping GNSS OEM boards and GNSS receivers. Besides the conception of these products, the company is also working on a reception system able to combine reception of GPS, GLONASS (the Russian GNSS system) and BEIDU (the Chinese GNSS system having for the moment regional coverage but that should develop a global coverage by 2020).

The mission went on in Singapore with the visit to several governmental administrations designed to help foreign companies entering Singapore and the Asian market. Big facilities are offered to foreign companies wanting to establish in this country. From full relocation services to tax exemption for the first three years of installation and a help to find potential investors, the strategy of the country is to attract high potential foreign companies to create better qualified jobs and boost the Singaporean economy.

Both China and Singapore are working on the field of Smart mobility and, due to the very high level of air pollution in both countries, the top priorities are electric and autonomous vehicles, including Artificial Intelligence and robotics as well. 

It was a very good and interesting opportunity to discover these promising but complicated markets, companies and anyone that want to approach them needs to consider the big cultural and business differences with Europe. Potential collaborations with the European companies taking part to the mission are already taking place. We’ll follow up in the next months.

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