With travel between Hong Kong and the mainland suspended for over 12 months now, the service industry has been badly hit.
I bumped into Siu Tak-wa, cofounder of KPM Healthcare Centre, and asked how the business was doing. He said a planned mainland customer stream didn't flow, but local demand has gone up.
Non-hospital comprehensive medical services like KPM Healthcare has become quite popular in recent years, especially in respect to cosmetic and insurance-related procedures.
Stricter patient admission screening by private hospitals under the pandemic, meanwhile, has boosted the use of non-hospital health-care services.
And with the rollout of vaccination schemes, people are becoming more health-conscious, Siu said, so the center is offering comprehensive physical examination packages so that people can get pre-vaccination check-ups conveniently.
Before the pandemic hit, local health-care facilities were springing up robustly, with a large part of their customer base coming from the mainland.
As these operations remain viable even under present circumstances, wouldn't they be overwhelmed by customers when the travel ban between Hong Kong and the mainland is lifted?
The doctor said mainlanders do have a real need for Hong Kong medical services, but the center's investment focus is turning north of the border.
KPM is considering setting up new service bases in Shenzhen and has begun to make contacts. If a plan materializes, the scale of operations there should even be bigger than those in the SAR.
Shenzhen has a far bigger population than Hong Kong. And as the people there become more and more affluent, their demand for quality health care naturally surges.
From the perspective of market development, it makes more sense to "move the pier to meet the boats," so to speak, than to have consumers come to Hong Kong.
But since market demand across the border is extremely great, Siu said, many details would need to be worked out to set up shop.
Securing the required capital investment is, by comparison, not much of a problem, he noted.
Siu Sai-wo is publisher of Sing Tao Daily
