Today, the “2nd Global Outsourcing Summit” is held in this beautiful city of Zhengzhou which is close to the Yellow River. On behalf of the People’s Government of Henan Province and 98 million people of Henan, I’d like to take this opportunity to warmly welcome all the political leaders, scholars and business celebrities from various countries and regions and convey our sincere thanks to Asia-Pacific CEO Association and International Outsourcing Center for your great support.

Today, the international service outsourcing, as the focus of a new round of international industrial transfer, is developing rapidly and becoming an increasingly effective means for multinational companies to improve their international competitiveness and an important booster to push forward rapid economic development of various countries and regions. At present, the tempo of integration and updating of international industrial transfer is speeding up, while we are also faced with such complicated scenarios as the slowdown of world economic growth and more uncertain and unstable factors caused by the global financial crisis. Therefore, unprecedented challenges and opportunities coexist for the development of modern service industry. Under this special historical background, this Summit chose as its theme “Global Outsourcing’s Role in Promoting the Prosperity of World Economy” and invited elites in all walks of life from different countries and regions to explore, exchange and investigate new possibilities. It’s fair to say that this Summit is a grand gathering that comforms to the current situation, discusses countermeasures and seeks development. It will certainly produce a positive and important effect on the promotion of national service outsourcing and development of world economy.

Located in the hinterland of China, Henan covers an area of 167,000 square kilometers and has a total population of 98,690,000. As the cradle of Yellow River civilization and one of the major origin sites of the Chinese nation, Henan enjoys obvious regional advantages, abundant labor resources and huge market potentials with a long history, splendid culture and better resource endowment. Henan is not only an important base for production and processing of farm and sideline products as well as raw materials of energy in China, but also an important hub of transportation and communications and center of people, material and information flows. In recent years, Henan has firmly grasped such important opportunities as promoting the development of the middle part in China to consistently accelerate industrialization and urbanization and promote modernization of agriculture, therefore successfully realizing a historic transformation from a traditional agricultural province into China’s key economic province, new industrial province and culturally influential province and leading to the new policy of building a strong province in economy and culture. 

Last year, its GDP reached 1.5 trillion yuan, ranking the fifth nationwide and the first in the central and western regions. The whole province was vigorously carrying out the strategy and accelerating the development of an open economy. It had established economic and trade relations with more than 180 countries and regions and become a hot spot for taking on domestic and international industrial transfer. In order to improve its international competitiveness in service outsourcing, Henan had chosen Zhengzhou, Jiaozuo and Luoyang as the first three provincial-level international service outsourcing bases and three provincial-level international service outsourcing parks which had already brought the clustering effect of service outsourcing into play and created superior industrial clusters.

Although the international economic environment is deteriorating rapidly and the domestic economy is faced with greater difficulties this year, Henan’s economy still maintains a steady and relatively fast growth momentum. It is expected that its annual GDP might exceed 1.8 trillion yuan, an increase of more than 12%, the actually utilized foreign capital will rise by 30% and the foreign export will increase by 26% or so. In today’s world characterized by in-depth development of economic globalization and complex and changeable international and domestic situations, opening-up and cooperation have been more important than ever before, so opening wider to the outside and expanding cooperation and strengthening communication and exchanges are not only effective means for countries and regions to give play to their advantages, draw on each other’s merits and accelerate development, but also an inevitable choice to break the bottleneck, deal with the crisis and reduce risks. We sincerely hope that all countries and regions join hands to explore new approaches to developing international service outsourcing under the condition of economic globalization and put forth efforts to enhance cooperation in the field of service outsourcing between major cities at home and abroad and major cities in the urban agglomeration of Henan, in the central plains of China. We also sincerely hope that the multinational companies take into serious consideration the comprehensive development advantages of Henan and exchange and cooperate with the enterprises in Henan in the field of service outsourcing so as to complement each other, work together for development and strive to make new contributions to the promotion of world economic prosperity and progress.

Finally, wish all the distinguished guests and friends present a wonderful time in Henan and wish this Summit a complete success. Thank you.