A major mission to help North East businesses win trade in the fast-growing Chinese market is being organised. UK Trade & Investment, Newcastle City Council and Newcastle University are jointly arranging the trip, which will focus on renewables, green technologies and hi-tech industries. Karen Dent reports.

THE Western world may be mired in economic gloom but it’s a very different story in China, which is currently experiencing phenomenal growth.

The relatively untapped Chinese interior offers huge opportunities for North East businesses willing to dip a toe into the market.

The trade mission leaving Newcastle in March is aiming to visit Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, Zhengzhou, Henan Province and Wuhan and Hubei Province – areas that are each expected to have markets as big as Russia, Spain or Canada by the end of this decade.

“It’s the pace of change – this is the ‘wild East’,” says Alan Smith, chief executive of Newcastle-based Red Box architects and the founding chairman of Baltic. “It’s a crazy place; it’s astonishing – it’s very pacy and there are very few Westerners there.

“It’s feels as if you are very much pioneering ... this is the inland urban areas that are driving their economy.”

Smith will be returning to China for his fourth visit in just seven months as his company seeks to secure more business in China.

Red Box has already nailed one big contract in China and is close to agreeing a further two joint ventures after making its initial inroads into the country last summer.

Smith said: “We are doing a project there now. We’re doing a research and development centre in Jiujiang that we are designing in the UK. We design the work here and supervise. That gives us some street cred out there.”

The firm is concentrating on the fast-expanding city of Chongqing, which has a population of 14 million and is twice the size of London.

“Fifteen years ago, there was nothing there. They are growing by one million people a year now,” said Smith.

“There’s so much work, there’s plenty to go round. They built a 30-storey hotel in 15 days – not 15 weeks or 15 months.

“It was all pre-fabricated and built offsite – they manufactured the floor slabs and the external wall skins and spent 15 days on site.