HONG KONG can enjoy success in the Africa trade if others do not snatch it away first , said Annie Wu, vice president and Hong Kong representative on the mainland's China-Africa Business Council.

Addressing a Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, she said "there are no rules in Africa", but Hong Kong businessmen have a better notion of how to "play it by ear" than most.



Dr Wu, who founded the first Hong Kong-China joint venture in 1980 with the creation of the Beijing Catering Corporation to supply airline food, explained China's current proactive African "win-win" policy in which it presents itself as a business partner rather than a charitable donor.



Also speaking at the lunch was regional research chief at Standard Chartered Bank Nicholas Kwan, who said: "We are all familiar with the Asian economic miracle. Something of the same is happening in Africa today. Africa is has been economically faster than the rest of the world for the last five years."



Within the last few weeks, DP World has a deal with Senegal to build and operate two container terminals in Dakar. AMP Moller is negotiating with Angola for another in Luanda while in Kenya's Port of Mombasa and Tanzania's Dar es Salaam is clogged with containers and over capacity faces Durban and Cape Town in South Africa. And in Egypt, a US$480 million loan has been granted to start work on container terminal near Suez.



Natural resources, chiefly oil, is the chief driver of African growth, said Mr Kwan, but advances in other areas are producing a richer population with the wherewithal to buy an ever-wider range of consumer goods.



Marc Castagnet, vice chairman of the Asia Africa Committee and chairman of SgT Ltd, an apparel concern with interests in Morocco and Tunisia stressed that Muslim countries were not as dangerous as many assumed, citing the recent a popular rejection of an Islamic party electoral bid in Morocco.



Patrick Chung, of 3Tech Corporation, which sells and services Chinese industrial electric generators, said Africa was welcoming to his low-cost, problem-free products, a reputation that more Chinese manufacturers are beginning to share.