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Notes from the Road: Hong Kong


I’m in Hong Kong right now attending some financial meetings and touring some infrastructure projects. It’s been an eye-opening trip so far. Today in a financial meeting, one of the smartest participants is an historian, a student of thousands of years of Chinese history.

He observed: “The era of a Dynasty always begins with low taxes and full treasuries and ends with high taxes and empty treasuries.”

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But it’s not been all meetings. We toured the Central Wan Chai Bypass and Island Eastern Corridor Link, currently under construction by AECOM. The Central Wan Chai Bypass and Island Eastern Corridor Link is 4.5 km in length and has six lanes of traffic. It’s scheduled to be completed by end of 2017. Impressive.

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AECOM is a global provider of architecture, design, engineering, and construction services for public and private clients (with a Nashville office!). In Hong Kong, the company early dominated the market for infrastructure architecture and construction; it’s responsible for more than half of the public works projects. Here, AECOM has 4,600 employees and accounts for one out of 800 workers in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has the fourth-largest harbor in the world, and AECOM built 100% of the container terminal. It will be building the new airport terminal, and the sewage water treatment plant.

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