Report: “Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in Euro-Tech”

Despite hawkish media reporting, there is no “collective brain” in China that is coordinating the overseas investment activities of public or private companies involved in the production of products and services reliant on advanced or emerging technologies. Nonetheless, there is growing convergence between the commercial objectives of private Chinese investors and the Strategic investment objectives of China’s State-Owned Enterprises.

In this brief exposé, Gareth Christopher Heywood examines the trends & tendencies of Chinese Investors – both public and private – in the European Technology Sector. The “push-pull” dynamic that steadily developed over a decade between a ready group of ambitious Chinese investors to expand their international footprint and a cadre of “EuroTech” vendors seeking coveted access to China’s domestic markets takes centre-place.

Over time, evidence of Chinese investors’ adherence to global standards as China’s domestic technology ecosystem integrated into the global one and inversely, the world’s technology ecosystem integrates into China, it has become evident that an expansion of their involvement in standard-setting or, ultimately, their deviation from global norms will occur. Yet present findings indicate a desire to have a seat at the existing table of global standard setting rather than furnishing a new one.

For those regulators, businesses and researchers outside China, therefore, the prescient need to develop a comprehensive methodological framework for analysing the competitive effect of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in EuroTech must be a priority, as this timely investigation demonstrates.