The meeting, organized by SOFOFA, was attended by the Foreign Investment Promotion Agency’s head of Investment Attraction.

A delegation of over 20 businesspeople and authorities from China’s Hunan Province met this morning at the offices of Chile’s Manufacturers’ Association (SOFOFA). The meeting was attended by Pedro Reus, SOFOFA’s international manager, and addressed by Long Yin, director of the Americas and Oceania division of the Hunan Province Chamber of Commerce, Marcela Urrutia, senior analyst at SOFOFA, and Pedro Asenjo, head of the Investment Attraction area of InvestChile.

After words of welcome from SOFOFA, the head of the Chinese delegation spoke about the Hunan Province, which has some 70 million inhabitants and a GDP of over US$440,000 million, and presented the companies participating in the mission, mostly from the infrastructure, energy and food sectors.

Pedro Asenjo spoke about the new services offered by InvestChile, noting that it has “Chinese staff who can provide specific information about different sectors and help companies organize meetings with the key players of the industries in Chile they are interested in.”

“We see China as an ally, it is our principal trading partner and Chile is its second most important market in Latin America. However, despite our good trading relations, Chinese foreign direct investment in Chile has been slow in arriving and remains a pending challenge for us,” he added.

According to the Chilean Central Bank, the stock of Chinese investment in Chile reaches only US$259 million, an amount that is in contrast to the volume of trade between the two countries.