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Our country is a global leader in embodied intelligence, with application scenarios expanding rapidly beyond factory floors and performance venues into everyday life. An embodied-intelligence company from the Chinese Mainland, introduced by the Hong Kong Investment Corporation Limited, will soon open its first fully autonomous robotic retail store outside the Mainland on the Hung Hom waterfront. The store will feature a humanoid robot manager providing multilingual customer service around the clock. The company’s management has chosen Hong Kong as the first stop in the global expansion of its retail store concept, specifically to leverage the city’s role as an international showroom, its open environment for piloting new technologies, and the strong visibility it offers for innovation and technology projects. International capital continues to follow closely, and remains optimistic about, our country’s leading position in various emerging and future industries. As an important international financing and fundraising centre for these enterprises, Hong Kong is becoming increasingly attractive to start-ups and technology companies.

Last week, an international consulting firm released its Global Wealth Report 2026, offering an observation that merits careful reflection: amid geopolitical turbulence and the sweeping global wave of artificial intelligence (AI), capital is being reallocated on an unprecedented scale. Unilateralism and regional conflicts have added significant uncertainty to the global economic outlook, accelerating capital flows towards stable and reliable safe havens. At the same time, continuing breakthroughs in AI have revealed enormous development potential, attracting substantial capital into related sectors. How Hong Kong can both capture and make good use of these two streams of capital is one of the key issues for our current development.

Yesterday, I concluded a five-day visit to Europe, covering France, Belgium and Switzerland. During the trip, I held in-depth exchanges at multiple levels with leaders from the political, business and financial sectors. My strongest impression from this visit was Europe's clear and growing desire for change. This is evident on several fronts. Politically, unilateralism and intensifying competition among major powers have reinforced Europe's awareness of the need to secure greater strategic autonomy. In economic and trade relations, Europe is seeking stronger multilateral cooperation and better risk diversification to build stronger economic resilience. In industrial investment, particularly in cutting-edge innovation and technology fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), there is a clear recognition that discussion must be turned into action, and that Europe needs to pool its strengths and catch up as quickly as possible.