Hong Kong business downturn worse than during Sars, lawmaker Michael Tien warns

Hong Kong’s tourism and retail operators are steeling themselves for a lengthy downturn that businessman and lawmaker Michael Tien Puk-sun says is worse than that during the 2003 deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

The decline in business during the Sars epidemic might have been sharp, but it lasted only several months before recovering, Tien said.

Now, the city was having to cope with falling numbers of mainland visitors, he said.

“This time, it is different. It is not a slump. But we don’t know when it will bounce back,” Tien, vice-chairman of the pro-establishment New People’s Party, said during a Commercial Radio programme today.

“We can’t see anything that can lead [businesses] to bounce back if we do nothing.”

Unfavourable conditions were clouding the city’s outlook, such as recent stock market plunges in mainland China and forecasts that the US dollar, to which the Hong Kong dollar was pegged, would remain strong in the next two years, he said.