📰 Key Highlights

Saudi Arabia’s LEAP tech show, originally held in Riyadh, made its East Asian debut in Hong Kong, drawing over 450 exhibitors mainly from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia, spanning biotech, robotics, and software. On-site, plenty of Chinese humanoid robots drew crowds with dance routines, and some vendors even draped their robots in traditional Arab shemagh headscarves to deliberately appeal to Gulf visitors. This scene reflects Hong Kong’s strategic pivot toward the Middle East in recent years: under intensifying geopolitical pressure from the West, Hong Kong is racing to court Gulf capital, with the most concrete result being a late-2024 MoU with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF to jointly establish a $1 billion fund supporting Hong Kong businesses entering the Saudi market.

Chinese companies aren’t waiting around either, generally using Hong Kong as a springboard to expand into the Gulf. Meituan’s overseas brand Keeta is a textbook case: it first pushed Deliveroo out of Hong Kong to become the city’s largest food delivery platform, then extended into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Brazil, partly with support from the Hong Kong government. Keeta CEO Qiu Junhao candidly admitted at the show that entering new markets requires adapting to local realities — for example, delivery riders need to stop and pray mid-route, something utterly unimaginable under Meituan’s old China management model, where riders were fined for any time overage. That policy has already been adjusted under regulatory pressure in China.

Meanwhile, several major Chinese tech companies are responding to Beijing’s signal of tightening AI regulation, pulling or scaling back AI virtual persona features one after another, leaving users who rely heavily on interacting with these virtual characters deeply disappointed.

💬 JudyAI Lab Perspective

Hong Kong’s role as a tech bridgehead to the Middle East is taking shape. This isn’t just an exhibition — it’s a microcosm of capital flows actually shifting under geopolitical realignment.

The most worthwhile thing for AI builders to watch in LEAP’s Hong Kong debut isn’t the visual spectacle of robots wearing shemaghs — it’s Keeta’s localization lessons. After squeezing Deliveroo out of Hong Kong, this Meituan overseas brand kept expanding into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf markets, but had to accept that delivery riders stop to pray mid-route — a violation that would have triggered direct fines under the old performance system. For those of us watching AI product design, this case shows: localization isn’t just interface translation, it’s a rewrite of the underlying assumptions about user behavior. At the same time, the move by Chinese tech companies to scale back AI virtual persona features under regulatory pressure is a reminder: when designing AI interaction interfaces, room for compliance adjustment has to be factored in from day one.

If you’re evaluating an AI product entering a new market, try listing all your “taken-for-granted” user behavior assumptions and ask each one: does this hold in the target market?

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