Earlier at the forum, our reporter Chen Tong spoke with Claus Rettig, the Asia-Pacific president of chemical giant Evonik Industries on how he views China's foreign investment landscape.

CHEN TONG Boao, Hainan Province "Global economic uncertainties are affecting the global supply chain. And Evonik obviously has also felt the impacts from these challenges. But how is your business going in the Asia-Pacific region?"

CLAUS RETTIG President of Evonik Asia Pacific "You are absolutely right. Unfortunately there are a lot of changes going on. So far, nobody knows really what the outcome is going to be, how much have been affected. In Asia-Pacific, we have a very good year. We could grow by around about six percent in sales, profitability even double digit. Here is still the growth market. And that includes the entire region. When we look to our business in Asia Pacific, very much half of our business in Asia pacific is China. So China last year performed well for us, not across all the portfolio, so it depends really very much where you are in your portfolio. But we were lucky to have very special materials grow nicely."

CHEN TONG Boao, Hainan Province "Here at Boao and at the just-concluded China Development Forum in Beijing, China has sent a strong signal that it is opening wider to the world. What's your take on China's commitment?"

CLAUS RETTIG President of Evonik Asia Pacific "Of course it's very much welcome. We did not suffer too much in the past from restrictions in our areas. I understand for future, there will be no restriction on any manufacturing anymore and it will open doors for more investments. We look for stability, predictably, market size growth, resources, which also mean talent. For chemical company, China has of course super strong chemical environment with good value chains, which is very important for us and an interesting area to grow and invest further."

CHEN TONG Boao, Hainan Province "Facing economic uncertainties and political tensions, do you foresee any challenges ahead?"

CLAUS RETTIG President of Evonik Asia Pacific "Absolutely, challenges we have more than enough. We're really actively looking for opportunities, what else can we do? We can cooperate with other Chinese companies to invest further and develop together. We are very much looking into strong orders from China in lithium ion battery, electric vehicles, hydrogen economy, and also recycling and circularity is a topic in China. So China has a lot of strongholds where we want to benefit from. So we are open for partnership."