Interview: Invest Qatar eyes investments from China to boost economic diversification

Invest Qatar's senior manager of investor relations Fahad Ali Al-Kuwari is interviewed during the 2024 Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada, on June 18, 2024. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)

"The expertise, know how, the talent is available in China and we would like to benefit from it. Hopefully Qatar can provide a platform that allows Chinese companies gain access to markets they didn't have access to before," a senior manager of Invest Qatar said.

by Martina Fuchs

TORONTO, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Invest Qatar, the Gulf Arab state's investment promotion agency, told Xinhua the country was planning to step up its cooperation with China and to attract more Chinese investment in a bid to diversify its economy away from oil and gas.

"We set up an office in Hong Kong to better tap into the Chinese market. China excels in many, many technologies. China is maybe the best in the world at hyper scaling very quickly," Invest Qatar's senior manager of investor relations Fahad Ali Al-Kuwari said at Collision, one of the world's leading technology conferences taking place in Toronto from June 17-20.

"The expertise, know how, the talent is available in China and we would like to benefit from it. Hopefully Qatar can provide a platform that allows Chinese companies gain access to markets they didn't have access to before," he emphasized.

Qatar is the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and one of the top financial hubs in the Middle East with the fifth largest Islamic finance assets globally.

The emirate and peninsular Arab country is also home to Qatar Airways and emerging as a tourism destination which is visa-free for citizens of over 100 countries.

"We're a very small, oil and gas rich country with around 300,000 people. We have a very strong financial and logistics sector that we used to export hydrocarbons," Al-Kuwari explained.

"But we would like to diversify to other sectors as well, not only with larger companies but with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well," he stressed.

Invest Qatar's senior manager of investor relations Fahad Ali Al-Kuwari speaks in an interview during the 2024 Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada, on June 18, 2024. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)

In May, data from China's General Administration of Customs (GAC) showed that total goods trade volume between China and members of the Arab League surged to 2.8 trillion yuan (about 393.75 billion U.S. dollars) in 2023 from 303.81 billion yuan in 2004, an increase of 820.9 percent.

The United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are China's top six trade partners in the Arab League in terms of trade value. They took up 84.8 percent of the total China-Arab trade in the first four months, GAC data revealed.

Collision, which is part of the Web Summit events, has gathered 37,832 attendees from 117 countries, it said in a press release.

It is the last Collision event, and its final year in Toronto, before it transitions to Web Summit Vancouver in May 2025.