The Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) will be arranging the tenth Asia-Europe Business Forum during Finland's Presidency of the EU. AEBF10 will be held in connection with the ASEM6 summit in Helsinki on September 10-11, 2006.

AEBF10 will be a meeting of corporate leaders that will give the ASEM process business life's recommendations for the promotion of trade and investment between Europe and Asia.

"AEBF10 will offer Finnish business life an excellent opportunity to create a wider profile with ASEM countries, authorities and companies," says Leena Sandström, an advisor at EK.

Aiming at concrete results

The contents of the forum will be the responsibility primarily of a steering committee and core group comprising representatives of business life in the member countries. As organizer of the forum, EK will have an opportunity to affect its profile and the themes to be dealt with.

"The forum, which has been arranged with the same concept since 1996, will be revised. EK's aim has been to make the AEBF a meeting that will interest the highest level of corporate management and produce more tangible results in terms of trade policy," Sandström says.

The forum's programme will last for two days. It will consist of plenary sessions with high-level guest speakers and working groups under the headings Trade, Investment, Financial Services, ICT and Infrastructure.

The programme has been planned in such a way that it will provide an opportunity for corporate leaders to create company ties and networking. On the second day a separate networking event will be held in cooperation with Finpro.

Chairmanship from different continents

Those who will be chairing the work groups will be assembled from the corporate leaders in such a way that the chairman and deputy chairman will come from different continents; if the chairman is European, the deputy chairman will be Asian - and vice versa.

Some of the chairmen and deputy chairmen have already been confirmed. For example, the country chairing the Infrastructure working party, which will focus on energy, will be Finland and the chairman will be Juha Rantanen, the CEO of Outokumpu. The deputy chairman country will be China.

Wider composition

The first AEBF was held in Paris in 1996. Between 300 and 400 corporate leaders have taken part in the forums every year, and the same number of participants are expected in Helsinki.

In Finland the AEBF will be assembling for the first time with an expanded assembly of 38 countries as the new EU countries and 3 new ASEAN members, i.e. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, will be included.

The chairman of the forum will be Christoffer Taxell, the chairman of EK's Board.

>> www.aebf10.org