The Swiss business community should redirect a lot of energy towards the Chinese market, an economics expert of Switzerland said Monday. While Switzerland has played a pioneering role in establishing joint ventures with China, there is still much that can be achieved, according to Stephane Garelli, a professor of economics at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and an honorary member of the China Enterprise Management Association.

Currently, Switzerland is still doing most of its business with traditional markets, especially with Germany, but as China is becoming increasingly important to the Swiss economy, Swiss enterprises should pay more attention to the Chinese market, Garelli suggested in an interview with the official website Swissinfo.

"Obviously with an economy growing at 9.5 percent, which was the case last year, and with the size of the market, I think we should really redirect a lot of energy towards the Chinese market," he said.

Swiss companies have not been idle in sizing up the opportunities in China, according to Swissinfo.

In May, lift and escalator company Schindler opened the world's largest escalator factory in Shanghai.

ABB, active in power and automation technologies, has also clearly seen the potential, with the Zurich-based group unveiling a major expansion plan in China last October.

Last week, the Esmertec company of Dubendorf near Zurich, which develops software for mobile phones, opened an R&D (research and development) and customer support center in Chengdu, capital of China's Sichuan province.

But Garelli also pointed out that China "is a high-risk market because it's growing quickly."

"The manufacturing sector of China is very efficient. Here at the IMD we are a bit more worried about the financial and banking systems, which are probably weaker than most people think," he said.

But this has not stopped the two main banking groups in Switzerland -- UBS and Credit Suisse -- from investing in China.

Only last month, UBS said it was considering buying a 500 million US dollars stake of the state-run Bank of China to cement its investment bank's position in China's fast growing economy.

And rival Credit Suisse announced at the end of June that it was opening a representative office in Guangzhou in southern China.

Source: Xinhua