TORONTO, June 19 - Global technology events company Web Summit will once again hold its Asian flagship conference RISE in Hong Kong in 2025, for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, its organizer said, while highlighting China's leading role in new technologies and apps.

"Hong Kong is confirmed for 2025. We're just planning out when we're going to do it, which venue and time of the year," Casey Lau, co-host of Collision, one of the world's leading technology conferences taking place in Toronto from June 17-20, told Xinhua.

Collision, also part of the Web Summit events, has gathered 37,832 attendees from 117 countries this week, its organizer said in a press release. It is also the last Collision event, and its final year in Toronto, before it transitions to Web Summit Vancouver in May 2025.

The company has run Web Summit Lisbon in Europe, Web Summit Rio in Brazil, Web Summit Doha in Qatar, and RISE in Asia -- since the company's beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

The last RISE conference was held in Hong Kong in March 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, when it attracted more than 16,000 attendees ranging from the world's leading founders, Fortune 500 CEOs, investors, media, and startups from over 100 countries.

"There's a lot of great stuff happening in China, I'm excited," Lau emphasized. "The main key is to bring a lot of those CEOs and founders to Hong Kong so that they can tell their stories to the world. The RISE conference in Hong Kong is very international. We want the media to see what's going on in China in and out from Hong Kong."

"China is very, very advanced in technology. I live in Hong Kong so I see a lot of stuff coming from Shenzhen. I think it's fantastic," Lau highlighted. "The world is not expecting what's coming out of China right now. I mean Tik Tok alone is the most powerful app created from China with the most amazing algorithm and it's just crazy to see the BYD cars."

"Some other major apps from China that I'm surprised haven't yet come over to the west. But when it does, it's a very powerful influencer and creator app that's so popular in China," Lau said.

 - Xinhua