Yeo Yuen Kee, Vice President and Head, Project Development 

and Real Estate Services of Ascendas China

Your Excellency Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister of France, honorable General Christian Emile QUESNOT, respectable Mr. Guo Gengmao, Acting Governor of Henan Province, Mr. Wang Wenchao, Secretary of Zhengzhou Municipal Party Committee, Mr. Zhao Jiancai, Mayor of Zhengzhou, and dear leaders and participating representatives,

First of all, I'd like to convey my thanks to Asia-Pacific CEO Association, International Outsourcing Center, Henan Provincial Government and Zhengzhou Municipal Government for your invitation.

I am Yang Yongqi from Singapore, Vice President of Ascendas Group and general manager in China. I would like to share with you our experiences as well as our experience in software outsourcing in India and China. Besides, I would also like to mention the trend we have seen under current circumstances and our software gardens and enterprise gardens.

How do we outsourcing enterprises develop? First of all, let's take a look at the general picture of outsourcing. As the speakers before me have said, the global outsourcing is developing faster and faster in China and around the world. At present, outsourcing in China is primarily in the field of information technology and I believe, in the next two years, little change will take place. But we'll see that the overall volume of outsourcing business will rise considerably in the next two years.

I have a report from the global service sector which shows that Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Dalian are in fact among the top 20 global outsourcing cities. China has made considerable progress in the global outsourcing market mainly due to government support. Therefore, I need introduce our business space and how the demand is changing.

Previously we focused our attention on the Made-in-China model, and now we concentrate on the Invented-by-China model instead. So you can see that our whole business needs have changed a lot. They were only small factories in the past but now they have become very advanced and modern software buildings. What's more, we also develop knowledge-based industries. These are very obvious changes. In the past ten years and more, great changes have taken place in the development room for our company.

What actually led to these changes? We have found the following reasons:

Firstly, we have shifted from manufacturing to knowledge-based industries. Now the rising energy costs continuously drive people to look for a sustainable development trend. There are some connections between sustainable development and the value of assets and people have been aware of the connections. It is for this reason that we have built a lot of buildings and infrastructure. Meanwhile, our telecommunications and transportation infrastructures have greatly improved. Now many companies have moved out of the CBD to the suburbs mainly due to the lower operating costs in suburbs. Besides, in the past, people mainly focused on the I Class cities, but now we pay closer attention to the II and III Class cities.

All of this has contributed to the current unique characteristic, that is the choice of cities is more important than the choice of countries, mainly because the municipal governments, the mayors and the local governments will offer a lot of supportive and incentive measures if you choose better cities. At the same time, competition will force these cities to focus on the development of their services, while improving the quality of their services. In the past, we had a one-stop national model, and now we find a more effective and inter-city model which can seek out the best city among similar cities. As we can see, significant changes have taken place in the field of outsourcing as well as in this model.

Financial information and enterprise gardens play a very important role in boosting the development of our outsourcing business. First of all, the enterprise gardens have created some new business opportunities and brought added value to these more mature companies. We have a core concept here, namely work, life and entertainment. The IT gardens can create a better environment and promote innovations while at the same time improving our productivity and enhancing the corporate image and employees' satisfaction. A better IT industrial garden should have all of these characteristics.

Finally, such an IT industrial garden enables us to achieve synergy among R&D institutions, universities, companies and market.

Then I'll introduce our experience in India. We established the IT industrial garden in 1995. We all know that the city of Bangalore has been taking the lead among the outsourcing cities since 1995. How was the project set up? First of all, we established a joint venture between Bangalore Government and the Government of Singapore. As a matter of fact, government commitment has contributed to our success. It took us more than a decade to complete it. This project has set a good example to the entire software gardens in India. Currently, we have six buildings covering an area of 2,300,000 square feet with 145 companies and 24,000 people working there.

How did Bangalore succeed? We have a lot of customers and better infrastructure there. Beside, we can also make full use of some of India's infrastructure to promote the development of India's infrastructure. This is the case in the IT industrial garden in Bangalore. If you pay a visit to our industrial garden, you can see that our industrial garden possesses all the necessary facilities. We also have another garden which might open a year later.

Next, I will brief you on what we are doing now? We are largely engaged in the creation of an all-round business environment to inspire people to strive for excellence and we have some core businesses. Ascendas is actually owned by Singapore, covering a full range of businesses and enjoying a famous reputation in the circle. Our business can be found in 30 cities of 11 countries—mainly Singapore, China, India and South Korea. The value of all the space under our management reaches 60 billion U.S. dollars, the entire area involved is 38,000,000 square feet, and we have 1800 customers worldwide.

Then I'd like to present some of the science and technology gardens and IT industrial gardens we are developing in China. In China you can see that we have built industrial gardens in a number of different parts of China, including Suzhou. Ascendas will continue to forge ahead and is to build a world-class IT industrial garden in China. At present we are planning the Dalian-Ascendas IT Industrial Garden. Dalian has a good pholisophy that is to create a better software environment. The local government established an industrial garden more than a decade ago and we moved into this garden later and worked there. There are also a number of other companies coming into this industrial garden. This is because we believe the industrial garden in Dalian could provide us with a very sound environment and facilitate our operations.

We also have industrial gardens in Singapore and Hangzhou. As you can see, we have different goals. We choose not only countries but also cities. The other project is in Suzhou. Now we are building a 33-hectare Industrial Garden in Suzhou. In fact, Suzhou is very successful in manufacturing and the Singapore-Suzhou Industrial Garden is a very successful industrial garden. Suzhou has been aware of these enterprises, and realized that these industries need to forge ahead. Therefore, they start to build software gardens and enterprise gardens of this kind.

Finally, I'd like to point out emphatically that the infrastructure of better enterprises can really make a difference and help you succeed particularly in the target fields. According to our knowledge, sound corporate development facilities are key to success. Infrastructure alone is not enough for IT industry to develop. There is a good industrial garden in Bangalore and Dalian respectively where you can meet a lot of world-class companies. However, in addition to infrastructure and hardware, software is also very important. We should provide better services for our customers in order to facilitate their success. This is the core of our business.

I have just mentioned that infrastructure alone is not enough and there are some other conditions that should be satisfied. These conditions include support of local governments, recognition of the industry and support of relevant personnel and the work force. It's very important for us to choose an official place for outsourcing.

That's all! Thank you!