WIDENING ITS MARKET IN ASIA AND EUROPE
MCI Group, the global leader in meetings, events, congresses, association management and strategic consulting, is pleased to announce the launch of two new offices, MCI Hangzhou and MCI Portugal.
MCI Hangzhou follows a joint venture partnership with two state-owned enterprises: Hangzhou Tourism Investment Co., Ltd and Hangzhou Zhonghe Investment Co., Ltd. While, MCI Portugal strengthens MCI Group’s presence in Europe with a synergy between the Spanish offices of Barcelona, Madrid and now Lisbon.
With these two new offices, MCI Group will further strengthen its unique presence in two extremely prominent MICE destinations.
MCI Hangzhou plans to build a team of 8-10 staff in the early growth phase. The office will leverage its shareholders’ network and insights of provincial and local political, economic, and social know-how, whereas their financial investment is expected to establish a locally-based team of professionals that aspires to be a key player of the strategic development of MICE in Hangzhou city.
With MCI China as majority shareholder, the new office will curate and create content for the company’s partners’ integrated space projects “Urban Constellation” and “Qianjiang Century Park” to enhance their visibility and engagement with their audiences.
Hangzhou, famous for the UNESCO World Heritage sites of West Lake and Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, is the capital of Zhejiang Province in east China. As the host city of 2016 G20 Summit, Hangzhou demonstrated its ability to host large international conferences and conventions and has been awarded the 2022 Asian Games. It is home to the e-commerce giant Alibaba, and a hotbed for internet and tech startup communities. ICCA ranked Hangzhou second to Beijing and Shanghai between 2011 and 2015 and among the global Top 100 in 2015.
Oscar Cerezales, Chief Operating Officer – Asia Pacific, MCI Group, indicates that “the new Hangzhou office is a strategic move for all partners to innovate value creation by taking on an in-depth and collaborative end-to-end approach towards for all’s stakeholders.” Additionally, Frankie Gao, Managing Director, MCI China, shares, “this joint venture is MCI China’s strategic development into second-tier cities by collaborating with domestic enterprises to engage local communities in co-creating platform and IP content.”
Florence Chua, new Managing Director of MCI Hangzhou comments, “this joint venture realises a strategic partnership that is committed to attracting, developing and delivering high quality experiences for international meetings, incentives, and conferences coming to the city. Moreover, it will support the international activation of Chinese brands and companies based in the region. And no least, to engage and grow the communities around our partners’ landmark property projects.”
Sandrine Castres, General Director of MCI in Spain and Portugal comments “Our arrival in Portugal began with the presence of one of our business lines as DMC (Destination Management Company), therefore, once we acquired the experience and having known the Portuguese market with a consolidated team, we expanded our portfolio of services as MCI Portugal. This is part of our expansion strategy in southern Europe and is a natural step in the Iberian Peninsula due to the growing demand from our international and Iberian customers who require more combined services both in Portugal and in Spain.”
The strong interest to extend MCI Group’s services into the Iberian region is due to the growing number of new and existing clients who want to explore new business opportunities with an established event organiser. And in 2018, ICCA ranked Portugal among the top ten cities in the world. Thus, this expansion is a step in the right direction to explore business within the national market.
