The implemented project activities and events during the last two and a half years culminated in a one-day National Launch Event in Beijing. The main objective of the event was to widen support and interest from stakeholders and target beneficiaries through high visibility and presentation of programme objectives, project outputs, findings and activities as well as achievements. More than 120 participants from Chinese ministries, public organizations, the European Commission, consortium members and wider stakeholders including European and Chinese enterprises attended.

Following opening speeches by an official from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Mr. Johan Cauwenbergh from the Delegation of the European Union to China highlighted in his speech the significance of the SWITCH-Asia initiative to the cooperation between the European Union and China in the field of sustainable development. Ms. Alexandra Voss from the Delegation of German Industry and Commerce Beijing then introduced the project’s achievements to participants and underlined its potential for facilitating business partnerships and sustainability. Subsequently representatives from the three Chinese project partners Chinese Institute of Electronics, China National Institute of Standardization and China Standard Certification Center presented key outputs and activities organized as well as updates on environmental standards and project cooperation with industry stakeholders and policy makers. Mr. Kemal Ayyildiz from Deutsche Telekom China then provided an overview on sustainable procurement strategies and Deutsche Telekom’s support for the SWITCH-Asia Project.

After the lunch break, practical insights on access to green financing for SMEs were provided by Mr. Frans Verspeek from the SWITCH-Asia Network Facility. The following presentation of Mr. David Gong from Business for Social Responsibility also focused on SMEs, and introduced the state of play of CSR in Chinese SMEs to participants. Besides offering interesting presentations, the high level event celebrated the official launch of the project’s newly developed E-Learning Platform on sustainable production for Chinese SMEs of the electrical and electronics industry. On this occasion the Project Leader Igor Darbo demonstrated the features of the platform designed in modules surrounding the three main project concepts of Eco-efficiency, OHS and CSR.

During the event’s concluding session, enterprises of the electrical and electronics industry in China participated in a declaration ceremony. The involved companies jointly agreed to comply with a declaration expressing their support for environmental impact reduction measures and the Conformity Model – a methodology developed by the project for assessing SMEs environmental and safety performance.

The National Launch Event successfully consolidated support and interest from stakeholders and public and private sector decision makers and kicked off the decisive project phase with two Business Facilitation Conferences and a series of over 30 SME Training Workshops throughout the key regions of the electrical and electronics industry in China.