450 Chinese investors recently attended the China-Israel Investment Summit. The conference is a follow-up to one in Beijing in January of this year, where sponsored by Infinity, a private equity fund backed by the China Development Bank and Clal Industries. At that conference, hundreds of Chinese investors met representatives of 100 Israeli companies.
“We are looking for investment opportunities in Israel and we will help them in development and marketing,” Liu Hao Peng, of New Alliance, a Shanghai based investment fund told The Media Line. “We aim to help them settle down in China and to manufacture their product in China.”
Israel is seen as a technology powerhouse, and many Chinese admire Israeli entrepreneurship, she said. There are already about 1000 Israeli start-ups that have some Chinese investment or that manufacture in China. China has also recently bought a controlling interest in Tnuva, an iconic Israeli food company, and Ahava Dead Sea products.
The summit hopes to make connections to bring Israeli technologies to the consumer market. It is organized by Amir Gal-Or, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Infinity, who has lived for the past 16 years in China.
Amir’s son Amit, 20, a student at NYU-Shanghai, had gotten in on the action, forming a company called Phresh.
“We partnered with an Israeli agricultural company which created organic solutions to preserve specific types of fruit and vegetables,” Gal-Or told The Media Line. “So they had a product for grapes, another for potatoes, and one for strawberries. We combined all of these so it’s like a cocktail of a single solution that kills a wide variety of bacteria in your refrigerator.”
The product can extend the shelf-life of fruits and vegetables by several weeks, he says.