How Hong Kong’s education push is quietly helping China’s tech rise

This article is co-written by Tracy Qu.

When robot enthusiast Andreas Widy decided to turn his underwater drone project from a lab in a Hong Kong university into a serious business, he waved goodbye to the city which he had called home for six years and headed north to China’s hi-tech hub, Shenzhen.

“[In Hong Kong,] shipments of materials [parts for the drones] could take one or two weeks […]. And if there’s a mistake, then you need to redo it and wait another two weeks for a new one,” Widy, co-founder and CEO of underwater drone startup Navatics said in a recent interview in Shenzhen. “Moving the business to the mainland makes this [the supply chain] much faster.”

Photo credit: strippedpixel / 123RF

Starting a business was not the initial plan for Widy, a 26-year-old from Indonesia who received his undergraduate education from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). In his final year of study, he was planning a career in academic research, but a conversation with his mentor Li Zexiang, professor of engineering at HKUST and the chairman of drone unicorn DJI, led him down a different path.

Li encouraged Widy to start his own company.

“He said there was sort of a gap between research and actually bringing the work to society,” said Widy. “The effort that you put into a startup will enable research to be used by people and can help society in different ways.”

Widy is among a crop of startup founders who received their education in Hong Kong and later brought their businesses to mainland China’s technology industry. Some of the more well-known cases include the world’s biggest drone maker, DJI, whose founder Wang Tao developed his first drones in the lab of HKUST as a student of Li.

As China continues its drive to be a technology powerhouse, Hong Kong’s contribution is usually under-reported, but it has been quietly pumping new blood into China’s startup scene – mainly in the form of students from the city’s cluster of world-class universities.

Other notable Chinese tech companies with Hong Kong roots include SenseTime, the world’s most valuable AI startup founded by a group of scholars and doctoral students from Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and led by computer vision scientist Tang Xiao’ou; AutoX, an autonomous driving startup established by Jianxiong Xiao from HKUST; and Orbbec, a 3D motion-sensing firm started by Huang Yuanhao, a docotral student from the Hong Kong City University.

Hong Kong is home to five of the world’s top 100 universities, namely University of Hong Kong, HKUST, CUHK, City University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, according to QS World University Ranking 2020. Some of their strongest research areas are in computer science and engineering, disciplines that have laid the foundations for the development of AI and robotics.

Apart from its reputation as an international financial hub, Hong Kong has also become an unlikely incubator of tech talent, helping China to make bridges with the rest of the world.

“What I saw and learned in Hong Kong was on a global scale rather than national, which helped me a lot in my own entrepreneurial journey,” said Zhang Tao, the founder and CEO of Shenzhen-based catering robot startup Pudu Technology and an alumnus of HKUST, in a recent interview with the Post.

HKUST, the alma mater of DJI founder Wang Tao, churns out about 50 startups founded by scholars and students of the university each year, with around 60% of them locating their business in mainland China, according to Donny Siu, head of the Entrepreneurship Center at HKUST.