Xinhua, June 30, HONG KONG — Entrepreneur Kelvin Tang, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, thought his life was finally moving in the right path when he left his well-paying executive tech job in London and launched his own company. He was able to integrate his three main interests: business, innovation, and creative.
“All I want is to wake up thrilled about my work. And I’ve known I’d open my own company since I was 13 years old’, said Tang, 31, co-founder and CEO of PONS.ai, an art tech marketing platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Tang’s decision deviates from the norm for young people in Hong Kong, who typically search for stable and financially secure careers in the fields of finance, law, and medicine after graduating from college. However, as the city works to develop its startup ecosystem to foster entrepreneurship and innovation, entrepreneurship is becoming a more viable alternative.
The number of startups in Hong Kong and the number of employees they employed hit a new high in 2022, according to InvestHK, the city’s investment promotion agency, with 72% of the founders identifying as Hong Kong residents.
Because Tang was the main singer of the award-winning rock band Pandora and co-founded the group, starting an art tech company looked like a logical decision to him. His interest in AI was also influenced by his university’s neuroscience major, which gave him a technical background. He also had professional experiences in investment banking, consulting, and technology, which gave him a well-rounded view of the corporate world. Tang established PONS.ai in 2021 with the goal of empowering artists all over the world and assisting them in generating more money. He discovered through international exhibitions that many businesses are also drawn to his company’s generative AI technology, and the group soon created B2B features.
The top objective quickly changed to finding a scalable business strategy that operates internationally. Tang travelled extensively last year, both domestically and abroad, meeting possible business partners and working with them to improve the product.
By providing retailers with AI-generated digital art, photos, short films, and social media captions to better sell themselves, the company is now able to tap into the enormous global e-commerce industry. The key to business expansion, according to Tang, is “creating products customers love.” It’s also one of the most important lessons that the non-profit HK InnoX Academy, which aims to educate ambitious businesspeople, strives to impart.
Nicole Lin, the academy’s head of external partnerships, stated, “We aim to foster a better innovation environment so that more young people in Hong Kong would regard starting a digital business as a potential career option.
Hong Kong is well known as an international financial centre, yet the manufacturing sector only accounts for roughly 1% of the country’s GDP. This casts doubt on the city’s ability to capitalise on its superior research and development capabilities and to foster innovation as a new growth engine.
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government has launched a number of initiatives in recent months to attract talent, particularly those with a background in science and technology, after realising the need of diversifying its businesses.
More crucially, the city is speeding up scientific and technology cooperation with the mainland, particularly with cities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA), which is known for its industrial capacity and includes Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao.
According to Lin, Hong Kong has a distinct advantage in the development of the science and technology industry, particularly in the early phases of startups.
In fact, she claimed, citing pertinent study findings, there have been 18 unicorn companies with “Hong Kong genes”.
“We discovered that they all follow a similar trajectory: they were born or incubated in Hong Kong, grew up with support from the GBA’s resources, and expanded into global markets,” she said. Regarding Hong Kong’s potential as a global innovation and technology centre, Tang is similarly upbeat.
“Many people doubt the ability of Hong Kong entrepreneurs to produce meaningful innovation, but keep in mind that we invented Octopus cards 25 years ago. He cited the city’s widely-used payment tool as an example of a then-leading fintech that is still very helpful today. His assurance is bolstered by the city’s history of entrepreneurship. Many of the business leaders in Hong Kong are self-made billionaires who started from nothing and have been passed down a “can-do” mentality.
“These cross-generational principles include being bold, pursuing your aspirations, and helping one other grow when times are tough. But in this new period, we also need to adjust if we want to advance,” he remarked.
