Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and the other familiar entrepots of global capitalism are often arranged, by analysts and consultants, into a sort of league table. One city has more listings, another more family offices, another more startups, another more sovereign wealth. The exercise is useful, up to a point. It also has a way of mistaking comparison for understanding.
For companies expanding across Asia, the Gulf, and beyond, the better question may not be which hub wins. It may be what each hub is for.
The usual measures are by now well rehearsed: foreign direct investment, company registrations, IPO proceeds, talent flows, trade volumes. These figures matter. They give policymakers and boardrooms an apparently objective language with which to describe where money and ambition are moving. But they can also flatten the story. In aggregate, hubs appear to be competing for the same companies, the same capital, the same attention. In practice, companies tend to behave less neatly. They may use one hub to raise capital, another to reach customers, another for tax or regulatory reasons, and another because it sits near suppliers, engineers, or a market they cannot afford to ignore.
At this year’s GBA-ASEAN Summit, held from June 30 to July 1, Hong Kong made the case for precisely this more layered view.
Over two days, senior officials and business leaders returned to a central proposition: Southeast Asia, represented by the ASEAN bloc, need not be understood as a rival to China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA). The two, they argued, could operate in tandem, with Hong Kong serving as a bridge between them.
The GBA comprises Hong Kong, Macau, and nine mainland cities in Guangdong, China. Its gravitational center includes Shenzhen, the manufacturing and supply chain powerhouse just across the border from Hong Kong, known in particular for hardware, electronics, and the dense technology ecosystem that has produced companies such as DJI and Insta360.
Hong Kong’s pitch, then, is not that it must defeat every other hub in a contest of abstractions. It is that the city can be useful at specific moments in a company’s expansion: when capital needs to be raised offshore, when a Chinese firm needs an international base, when a foreign company wants access to mainland China, or when a business is trying to move between markets without fully belonging to any one of them.
On the first day of the summit, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee set the tone. Economic ties between Hong Kong and ASEAN, he said, had continued to deepen, particularly in trade. ASEAN, he noted, was Hong Kong’s second largest trading partner in 2025. Figures from the city’s Trade and Industry Department bear this out: total merchandise trade between the two sides neared HKD 1.7 trillion (USD 216.7 billion) last year, accounting for 15.3% of Hong Kong’s global merchandise trade, and expanded at an annual rate of 7.6% from 2021 to 2025. ASEAN was also Hong Kong’s second largest export market after the Chinese mainland, receiving 17.4% of its domestic exports, or roughly HKD 11.5 billion (USD 1.5 billion).
But trade volumes alone do not quite capture Hong Kong’s ambitions.
“There is now a wave of Chinese companies going global,” said Alpha Lau, director general of Invest Hong Kong, also known as InvestHK, the government body responsible for supporting overseas businesses that set up and expand in and through Hong Kong. “A couple of decades ago, it was just selling goods overseas, then it gradually became supply chain movement overseas. […] Now, we are in a phase where Chinese companies are not only selling overseas, but actually expanding overseas with their own networks and footprints.” Lau was speaking with KrASIA in an interview on the sidelines of the summit.
This is where Hong Kong sees its opening. The city has seen a sharp rise in activity on its local bourse, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which recorded 119 new listings in 2025. Lau said that nearly 500 companies have entered the IPO application pipeline so far this year, a sign, in her view, that Hong Kong is again drawing attention as a venue for offshore financing.
For Lau, the listing activity is part of a broader shift. Chinese companies are no longer merely exporting goods or moving fragments of their supply chains abroad. Many are building overseas sales networks, research functions, operating teams, and financing structures. That requires a base outside the mainland, and Hong Kong is positioning itself as the first offshore stop.
Lau linked this role to the distinction between the mainland’s capital controls and Hong Kong’s more open financial system. For companies expanding internationally, funds raised or earned offshore may need to be pooled outside the mainland rather than immediately remitted back. Hong Kong, with its proximity to China and its status as a free financial market, is well placed to perform that function.
“Chinese companies have domestic headquarters wherever their hometown is,” Lau said. “But when they start to venture overseas, they need an offshore command center outside mainland China. They tend to use Hong Kong as the first step.”
By Lau’s estimate, roughly four in five Chinese companies going global tend to set up in Hong Kong first.
Hong Kong is also making the case in the other direction. As China’s supply chains, manufacturing base, and technology ecosystem attract growing interest from overseas businesses, the city is presenting itself as a route into the mainland. One arrangement often cited is the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, or CEPA, between Hong Kong and the mainland, which can give eligible Hong Kong-registered businesses, including foreign firms with a presence in the city, preferential access to parts of the mainland market.
Both the inbound and outbound flows rely on some of Hong Kong’s most familiar attributes: proximity to the GBA, with Shenzhen and other manufacturing and technology clusters just across the border; a common law system; free capital flows; a currency pegged to the US dollar; and an English-language business environment that can feel more legible to international firms than the mainland market itself.
The GBA-ASEAN Summit 2026 offered a preview of how Hong Kong intends to reinforce this two-way flow. Rather than argue that Hong Kong should replace other hubs, the event’s central message was that the city can sit between them: linking the GBA with ASEAN, helping Chinese companies move outward, and giving foreign firms a more familiar legal and financial route into China.
At the summit, the ASEAN Chamber of Commerce Hong Kong (ACCHK) was formally launched, with a mandate to connect businesses, institutions, and leaders across Hong Kong, the wider GBA, and ASEAN.
More attention, however, was drawn to the Northern Metropolis, a vast development zone taking shape along Hong Kong’s border with Shenzhen. Covering about 30,000 hectares, or roughly one-third of Hong Kong’s total land area, the project is intended to broaden the city’s economic base beyond its dense urban core.
One of the most closely watched elements of the plan is the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Co-operation Zone, anchored on the Hong Kong side by the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park (HSITP). The Hetao zone, still under construction, follows a “one zone, two parks” model: a Hong Kong park at the Lok Ma Chau Loop, led by HSITP, and a larger Shenzhen park across the border. The Hong Kong side is closely tied to the San Tin Technopole, planned as a major technology and innovation district within the Northern Metropolis. Related construction is being phased over the coming decade, with some major links targeted for the mid-2030s.
Taken together, these initiatives suggest that Hong Kong is trying to turn the metaphor of the bridge into a set of institutions, roads, labs, and business networks. The establishment of ACCHK is meant to formalize links between the GBA and ASEAN. The Northern Metropolis and Hetao zone are meant to deepen Hong Kong’s physical and institutional ties with Shenzhen and the wider GBA.
In other words, Hong Kong’s hub strategy is moving beyond its traditional strengths in finance, listings, and capital flows. It is now also about building the infrastructure and partnerships needed to move companies, capital, technology, and talent between markets.
That supports Lau’s broader point: hubs need not serve identical purposes. A company targeting the Gulf may look to Dubai or Riyadh. A company expanding across Southeast Asia may continue to rely on Singapore. A company trying to access China, or the GBA in particular, may find Hong Kong more useful. The decision depends less on an abstract ranking of cities than on taxation, business costs, policy access, market proximity, and the exact expansion route a company is trying to build.
“How do we collaborate further to increase trade and investments within the region, and then use the region to help our companies go farther afield into the Gulf, Europe, South America, or other places? There will probably be other hubs that we need.”
In that context, Hong Kong and Singapore, so often compared, may be more useful as linked nodes than as direct substitutes. Lau said InvestHK works closely with Singapore’s consulate general in Hong Kong as part of what she described as a “dual-city strategy,” responding to rising interest from companies moving eastward amid geopolitical and trade pressures.
“Because of trade shifts and tariff challenges, we need to be able to trade more,” she said.
Other figures in Hong Kong’s innovation ecosystem made similar arguments. Speaking with the media during a tour held ahead of this year’s GBA-ASEAN Summit, Eric Or, chief ecosystem development officer of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP), said that collaboration, rather than rivalry, defines Hong Kong’s relationship with Singapore.
“People like to compare us to Singapore, and people talk about how we compete with Singapore,” Or said. “In fact we don’t, we work very closely with Singapore.”
HKSTP, he added, has close working ties with various Singaporean organizations, particularly universities and research institutions. He cited the Home Team Science and Technology Agency, or HTX, as one example, saying HKSTP and HTX are collaborating on potential technology applications for police and correctional services.
The more consequential question is whether Hong Kong can preserve the distinctiveness that makes its bridge role valuable in the first place. Its latest initiatives are designed to deepen its connection with mainland China, especially the GBA, while extending its reach into ASEAN and other overseas markets. Lau also said Hong Kong’s first five-year plan, now under consultation, is expected to align closely with China’s national development priorities.
That alignment may strengthen Hong Kong’s access to mainland opportunities. But the city’s usefulness as a hub still depends on the qualities that differentiate it from the mainland: common law, open capital flows, English-language business infrastructure, international talent, and the ability to operate between systems.
The test, then, is not whether Hong Kong can beat Singapore, Dubai, or any other hub on headline numbers alone. It is whether Hong Kong can remain distinct enough to be trusted as a connector, while becoming integrated enough for that connection to remain commercially valuable.
Note: HKD figures are converted to USD at rates of HKD 7.84 = USD 1 based on estimates as of July 3, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.