Matevž Frangež - State Secretary, Ministry of the Economy, Tourism and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia
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00:00Slovenia says its doors are open to more Chinese investment despite recent trade
00:11tensions Beijing is looking to expand business opportunities across Europe as
00:16China and the EU mark 50 years of diplomatic ties CGTN's Alyosha Milenkovic
00:21spoke to Slovenia's economy minister Mateusz Franges I strongly believe that
00:27in this time of big economic transformation probably the biggest one in
00:32human history we should align more ourselves into boosting collaboration I
00:39believe we should focus more on the you know the old cultural ideas the Chinese
00:47civilization is also built on so sense of harmonization how to pursue the mutual
00:54good in international trade because raising instability in the world doesn't
01:02serve either European Chinese American or other purposes our expert present 85% of
01:10our GDP so it's really high we are one of top three European industrialized countries
01:17we are the seventh most robotized economy in the world 11th most complex economy in the world in
01:25terms of complexity of the products we made so yes we would like to see how we can
01:33strongly involve ourselves into the Chinese value chains investments are going both ways it's two
01:42way street for both China and Slovenia and we see several big investments from
01:48China here like high sense which is one of the success stories of Chinese
01:52businesses here in Slovenia in which sectors you see possibility for expanding that
01:58kind of mutual collaboration between China and Slovenia we see two totally
02:05different sectors for now the first one is domestic electronics domestic appliances with high sense
02:13entrance to Gorenia the national pride of Slovenia where we see the further potential of course in
02:21automotive sector a large sector of our industry is now involved into European automotive value chains we
02:30are important supplier to the European car industry in that sense there is not a single car made in
02:38Europe without our components our materials our parts Slovenia was one of five countries which voted
02:46against imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs here in you why Slovenia did that and how do you see
02:53potential role of Chinese EV industry here in Europe because of the principle and the principle is that we are
03:05living on the rule-based international trade rule trade law and we would like to keep it that way so the
03:15tariffs do not add to the free and open economy global economy and second it was also a pragmatic move we expect that the
03:31localization needs of Chinese investors will of course seek for possible occasions we would like to be one of
03:42possible occasions that Chinese producers will consider when deciding about their future European
03:50operations we have seen recently that the US president Donald Trump imposed a lot of tariffs for so many
04:00countries around the world including the EU then we have seen that it is being the decision has been paused or put on
04:08hold for the next 90 days but in case those terms do actually go through how Slovenia will really react to that and how do you think that you can overcome those possible tariffs and how those will affect Slovenia
04:23we believe that this is not sustainable that this is not in the interest of the open global economy we will see other problems derived from
04:35the this logic that this is dangerous and could also worsen the relations in international community but also harm the economic and social development in various countries including US
04:57including US