Thirty years of working across five Asian markets, roughly a decade of them based in Hong Kong, gives you a particular kind of pattern recognition. A government changes, or an economy reaches for its next stage, and out comes the package: tax incentives, innovation funds, talent programs, industrial parks, faster permits. The details shift. The offer does not. When every jurisdiction runs the same program, investors stop feeling strongly about any of them.

On Sept 16, John Lee Ka-chiu, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, unveiled the city’s first five-year plan, its first attempt to map its economic and social development over five years. It contains genuinely useful commitments: research and development targets, a Northern Metropolis hub beside Shenzhen, new innovation parks. Such a plan is overdue. The question is not whether these things are worth doing. It is whether Hong Kong should compete on the same offer at all.

Hong Kong did not win by offering foreign companies more. It won by asking less of them.

For decades, a company could use Hong Kong as its legal home, its financial base, its gateway to the Chinese mainland — without moving its people, its factories or its customers here. The economic address and the physical address were never required to match. A European trading house could hold Asia assets in a Hong Kong entity, bank here, settle contracts here, access the mainland from here — while its management sat elsewhere and its operations ran somewhere else entirely. That was not a loophole. That flexibility was the product.

A company could belong here without everything it did having to be here. That model matters more now because two things have changed at once.

The first is artificial intelligence. For example, a team of a dozen members, engineering across three cities and selling across five markets, can now do work that once required a far larger physical organization. It produces almost nothing that traditional attraction models measure: it has no significant local headcount, no expensive office lease, no chief executive officer who relocated permanently.

The second is geopolitics. Companies building across Asia now have to decide where ownership sits, where intellectual property is held, where contracts are enforceable, where capital can move freely — and how to tap into the mainland, Southeast Asia and global markets without foreclosing any option. Hong Kong brings an unusual combination to that decision: common law, a freely convertible currency, deep capital markets and a land border with the world’s second-largest economy. These took a century to build. No other place can claim an equivalent.

People can increasingly work anywhere. The company still has to belong somewhere.

Consider a B2B (business to business) software founder selling to Japanese and Korean manufacturers. Her engineering team is in Ho Chi Minh City and her largest customer in Osaka. She spends 10 days a month in Hong Kong for investors, banking and the relationships her business runs on. Her company is incorporated in the SAR and its capital is raised there. She does not choose Hong Kong despite living elsewhere. She chooses Hong Kong because she can live elsewhere.

InvestHK’s 2025 survey found one in three startup founders in Hong Kong is already nonlocal. That says nothing about where they live. It does raise a question: How many more would choose Hong Kong if choosing it did not imply relocating everything?

The five-year plan contains one signal worth reading carefully. The SAR government is rolling out CorpID — a HK$300 million ($38.24 million) Digital Corporate Identity platform due from the end of 2026, giving companies secure, reusable authentication for government services and online transactions.

The logic is sound: administrative friction wastes companies’ time. But CorpID is available only to companies already incorporated or registered in Hong Kong. It solves the friction of operating here. It does not touch the friction of choosing to come.

According to the 2025 Annual Survey of Companies in Hong Kong with Parent Companies Located outside Hong Kong, a total of 11,070 companies with mainland or overseas parents were operating in Hong Kong — a record, up 11 percent year-on-year. About 84 percent are concentrated in just three broad sectors: import/export, wholesale and retail; financing and banking; and professional, business and education services. The attraction machine is running at record speed. The mix has barely moved.

In five years’ time, most of Hong Kong’s competitors will have announced larger parks, bigger funds, more generous packages. Some will have built them. The offer will look familiar. It always does.

What will not be easy to replicate is what Hong Kong already has: the legal architecture, the capital depth, the access to mainland markets, the contractual certainty that serious companies need when deciding where their company — not just their office — belongs.

Hong Kong does not need every founder to live here. It needs more of the world’s founders to want their companies to belong here. The five-year plan sets the ambition. The question it leaves open is whether Hong Kong will pursue that by becoming more like everywhere else — or by becoming more like itself.

The author is a former investment banker turned tech journalist who writes about Asian business, technology, innovation, and capital markets. He previously worked at GE Capital and Korea Development Bank group.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.