Hong Kong adds value to a shared belt and road talent pool
The city’s extensive range of advantages and favourable policy initiatives put professionals on the path to long-term success
Hong Kong’s determination to expand its role as a talent hub is reflected in a series of initiatives designed to draw people to the city and enable them to share their abilities with the wider world.
These include a series of talent admission programmes that, since the end of 2022, have attracted more than 203,000 people to the city from around the globe.
Together with efforts to develop Hong Kong into a world-class destination for post-secondary education, the Hong Kong government is committed to enhancing pathways for talent exchange between the city and emerging countries in Asia and beyond, including those that are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Its global development strategy, launched in 2013, is designed to boost trade and economic partnerships while fostering cross-border collaboration in fields such as healthcare, digitalisation, innovation and green development.
One of the Hong Kong-based companies that is actively cultivating talent in the city and across the region is FWD Group. The company, founded in the same year as the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, is Hong Kong’s only home-grown pan-Asian insurance group.
FWD is focused on the Southeast Asian market, one of the initiative’s key regions. It now operates across 10 countries and territories, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and the Philippines.
The company has benefited from Hong Kong’s robust financial and regulatory framework and its status as an international risk management centre – as well as its rich talent pool in actuarial, risk management, finance and legal services.
These factors have helped the company to expand its business over the past 12 years: it now serves more than 30 million customers and has over 6,900 employees and 55,100 contracted agents across the region.
Huynh Thanh Phong, CEO of FWD Group, says the key to success for any insurance firm lies in its staff – a belief that he still holds to be true after more than a decade in his role. Offering his employees opportunities to grow professionally remains close to his heart.
“The insurance business is very personal,” he says. “I always encourage my young staff from different countries to gain international exposure by working in different locations, which will become invaluable as they advance their careers. It will also give them a new perspective of the world and enable them to better take care of our customers.
“At FWD, we want our Hong Kong staff to gain international exposure elsewhere in Asia, and we want our Southeast Asian colleagues to work in Hong Kong to further develop a global mindset. Middle-management staff from other countries often come to Hong Kong and then return home enriched by their experience. Many people in our company have built their careers through rotations in the city.”
For Huynh, Hong Kong is a vibrant city that connects mainland China with the rest of the world, including many rapidly developing belt and road countries within Asia. The city has also been integral to his personal and professional growth. In 1979, Huynh arrived in Hong Kong as a 12-year-old refugee from Vietnam, neither knowing anyone nor speaking any Cantonese or English. After spending several months in the city, Huynh emigrated to Canada, returning to Hong Kong in the early 1990s to pursue a career in the insurance industry.
“Back then, people said life insurance was already a mature industry in Hong Kong, and that the growth markets lay in Southeast Asia,” Huynh recalls. “But more than 30 years later, it still amazes me how much the city continues to find ways to grow and evolve. That’s really important for us because insurance is an industry that looks at the long term; it takes a lot of patience and hard work to build a successful business.”
Another way Hong Kong is affirming its position as a talent hub is through the promotion of the “Study in Hong Kong” brand. This initiative, outlined in Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu’s policy address last year, includes measures to develop the city into a world-class tertiary education hub.
To attract more international students to study in Hong Kong, the government offers various scholarships and incentives to young people with an outstanding academic record to pursue their studies in the city’s post-secondary institutions.
One notable example is the Belt and Road Scholarship, which was first launched in the 2016-17 academic year. Today, the scheme has an annual quota of 150 and is open to applicants from all belt and road countries enrolled in publicly-funded undergraduate or research post-graduate programmes in Hong Kong. In addition, the city attracted more than 4,000 university students from belt and road countries in the 2024-25 academic year.
Between April last year and last month, about 1,400 Hong Kong youths participated in the Home and Youth Affairs Bureau’s internship and exchange programmes in belt and road countries and other parts of the world. Additionally, more than 7,500 young people from the city have travelled to these countries under the government’s Working Holiday Scheme, which enables them to live and work abroad to gain more international exposure. Meanwhile, over 5,600 youths from belt and road countries have been granted working holiday visas to visit Hong Kong.
One of the recipients of the Belt and Road Scholarship is Chananchida Choochua, who came to Hong Kong in 2018 to join the Integrated Batchelor of Business Administration programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She learned about the scholarship when she attended the Hong Kong Education Fair in her home city, Bangkok, while in her final year of secondary school.
“I’ve always wanted to study abroad, and Hong Kong was the perfect place for me,” Choochua says. “It’s a global financial and business hub and embodies the East-meets-West spirit. The Belt and Road Scholarship gave me the opportunity to make this dream a reality.”
She graduated from CUHK in 2022 and started working at Kerry Logistics the following year. In 2024, she embarked on a business development role at Kerry eCommerce in Hong Kong, where she is responsible for finding new clients, communicating with existing customers and conducting shipment analyses and cost simulations on their behalf. The job not only allows her to apply the skills she learned during her studies, but also enables her to pursue the career path she has always desired.
“On the mission statement I submitted seven years ago to CUHK for the Belt and Road Scholarship application, I expressed my goal of pursuing a career that would help facilitate trade between Thailand and Hong Kong,” she says. “There are many great products in Thailand and I want to encourage more exports to other countries and regions. My current job gives me the opportunity to do just that.
“Without the scholarship it would have been very difficult for me to study and work in Hong Kong, where I got to meet people from all around the world and be immersed in an international environment. The scheme also helps facilitate cultural exchange between Hong Kong and belt and road countries. The opportunity has truly broadened my horizons.”