With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
Kevin PhilliPs/ getty iMages July 2015 BCBusiness 155 appetite for B.C. minerals and lumber. HSBC Canada's chief economist David Watt says Canadian companies have tra- ditionally been slow to take advantage of opportunities in China, and the com- panies that have gone there have been limited to a handful of sectors. "China has obviously been an opportunity, a wonderful opportunity," he says. "But we tend to be very, very levered towards the commodities, without necessarily creating the back stop in case the com- modity story doesn't play out as we'd anticipated. You can see that across the Canadian economy." As China's population grows wealth- ier, the new opportunities will be in financial services, healthcare, infor- mation technology and agriculture, says Watt. "We don't have a big private health-care sector in Canada, but if you think about what's going on in China, their demographics are certainly lean- ing towards an aging population." The ultimate goal, he says, should be to uti- lize Canada's resource wealth to develop value-added sectors in the economy and become more like Germany. That coun- try's main exports—medical supplies, aerospace technology and cars—are less vulnerable to the fickle fortunes of the commodities markets. Canada needs to develop policies that encourage companies to invest in sectors beyond commodities, Watt says. "I'm generally disappointed at how we're doing that. We tend to talk a lot in that regard, but because the resource sector is such a draw it's challenging to create some sort of balance." • in 2003, the provincial government opened an office in shanghai called the canada Wood Project to promote b.c. forestry products. "initially people were very skeptical and said that you're not going to sell lumber into china because they don't use lumber for construction" WORTH THE WAIT (From left) A new town- house complex in China being built with B.C. wood; a container ship heading to a Chinese harbour ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★