Two think tanks on Sunday called on local and mainland authorities to beef up support for Hong Kong entrepreneurs doing business in the Greater Bay Area.

The Hong Kong Coalition and Our Hong Kong Foundation visited 13 entrepreneurial bases in the Greater Bay Area and talked to 31 Hong Kong entrepreneurs working there.

The two groups came up with 10 proposals hoping to address challenges faced by Hong Kong entrepreneurs, including the creation of a service centre in Hong Kong to help connect local companies with entrepreneurial bases on the mainland.

“Entrepreneurs are not very familiar with potential clients, but when they develop a product, they need to expand their business network and actually sell them to earn revenue,” said the foundation’s assistant research director Victor Kwok.

“[And] as they expand, they will [also] need external financing in order to achieve further breakthrough,” he added.

To ease funding pressure, Kwok suggested authorities to expand cross-border credit referencing to allow Hong Kong entrepreneurs to use their financial subsidy obtained from the government as collateral when they apply for bank loans.

The think tanks said as of October 2024, there were 84 entrepreneurial bases in Guangdong province for young entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and Macau, with more than 5,700 incubation projects underway.