At the world Green Expo in Nanchang on Thursday, visitors inspected the latest technology and sampled delicacies from around the world while robot dogs scampered – or hobbled – around them. But much of the attention was on a modest pavilion in the middle of the hall promoting Ireland as this year’s “country of honour” at the Expo.
“Ireland is very well-perceived within China,” said Chen Wen, president of the Irish-China Association for Science and Technology Exchange (ICSATA).
“People regard Ireland as friendly and good for innovation, ICT, software, and agriculture, as well as high quality education. That’s their perception.”
Chen describes ICSATA as a non-governmental, non-profit bridge to connect businesses in Ireland and China in the area of technology, trade, education, and culture. Increasingly, Irish science and technology companies are not simply trying to buy products from China or to sell into the Chinese market but are looking for partnerships to create something new for both sides.
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PV Generation is a Cork-based company with an established business installing solar panels, mostly in farms and homes. Its founder Richard Linger was in Nanchang to launch SmartGen, an integrated home energy system combining solar panels, a heat pump and batteries.
It is a collaboration with Huawei and Tongyi, a leading Chinese manufacturer of heat pumps, which converts low-grade thermal energy from the environment into indoor heating and cooling.
“It’s an AI platform that allows energy users to optimise their system,” Linger said, adding that it can cut bills by up to 30 per cent by automatically switching to the most efficient source.
He hopes to roll out the system from Ireland into the British market and on to mainland Europe, where flexible electricity markets allow for the exploitation of variation in costs. He has no ambition to move into the Chinese market but he says the co-operation is good for his Chinese partners as well as for his company.
“We give them access to expand their market. For Huawei, it allows us to have a market differentiator in the Irish market with a technology that we’ve developed linked to their technology. So we’d foresee maybe expanding our sale of Huawei products by 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 per cent over the next few years,” he said.
“And for Tongyi, we facilitate their access to the Irish market, where we’re using their technology, coupling it with the Huawei technology batteries and inverters, as a symbiotic energy solution. So they increase their sales, fundamentally.”
Fierce competition
Tongyi’s general manager Sunrise Tang said the partnership also helps his company to differentiate itself within the Chinese market, where competition is fierce.
“We’ve equipped our heat pumps with a brain. They can think smartly and they can talk with other renewable energy equipment in a standard protocol. That’s made our heat pump different. And we can reduce the energy cost significantly rather than just improve the efficiency of heat pump units slightly so we can bring more value to our customer,” he said.
Other Irish exhibitors included Shamrock Green Tech, which supplies green energy and AI-related products across Europe and Oriel, which makes health supplements from sea salt. Opening the pavilion, Irish ambassador to China Nicholas O’Brien said that Ireland wanted to deepen trade links with China, adding that “we need to protect an open trading system based on a level playing field”.
In the afternoon, most of the Irish participants at the world Green Expo took part in the first Jiangxi-Ireland Economic and Investment Cooperation Conference at a hotel next door. Jiangxi province has a population of 45 million, bigger than all but four EU member-states, and an economy the size of Norway’s.
Representatives from the IDA and Enterprise Ireland told the conference about what Ireland had to offer investors and about the services Irish companies are offering in China. Irish universities run more than 100 collaborative programmes in China, with 12,000 students taking full-time courses for degrees and diplomas that are recognised in both China and Ireland.
Studying in Ireland is attractive for many Chinese people, partly because the country is viewed as safe and friendly but also because the total cost is more than 30 per cent lower than in Britain and 50 per cent less than in the US. Foreign students can work in Ireland for up to two years after they graduate and many students from China find temporary work with Chinese companies with Irish operations or headquarters.
Zhang Zhewei, the IDA’s managing director for China, gave a detailed presentation about Ireland’s advantages as a place to do business but he did not assume too much familiarity on the part of his audience. Pointing to a map of Europe, he told them “that place that looks like a teddy bear on the left, that’s Ireland”.
