On 22 February, EMITA, the East Midlands International Trade Association, is holding an event called Opportunities for UK Businesses in China’s Regional Cities. It is organised in partnership with the China-Britain Business Council (CBBC) and UKTI.

Many British businesses continue to focus only in a small number of places in China, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen. However, markets in these locations are becoming increasingly competitive.

The report – Opportunities for UK Businesses in China’s Regional Cities – presents the findings of research conducted in 2011, by CBBC and the Centre of International Business at the University of Leeds for and on behalf ofUKTI.

The key findings are that since 2007, exports to China from the East Midlands have risen from £267m to £424m. The main sector is machinery and transport equipment, which has grown by 58% since 2007.

The East Midlands group has identified two priority locations to develop business with China –Sichuan Province / Chongqing Municipality (which is twinned with Leicester) and Zhejiang Province / Ningbo. Even if Mandarin is the lingua franca, the inhabitants of Zhejiang speak Wu, a branch of Chinese, but the Wu dialects are very diverse, especially in the south, where one valley may speak a dialect completely unintelligible to another valley a few kilometres away. The main language of the Sichuan province is Sichuanese, a branch of Southwestern Mandarin, which is highly divergent in phonology, vocabulary and even grammar from the standard language.

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Last October, the Li-Fi Consortium was formed. It is an industry group open to any company or organisation focused on the development and market introduction of optical wireless communication technology. Radio-based wireless is workable, the problem is that, with an ever increasing number of devices connected, only a limited amount of radio spectrum is available. Li-Fi offers the opportunity to exploit illumination, a completely different part of the electromagnetic spectrum which can be found almost everywhere.

Bulbs and tubes are not really suitable for modulation, but they are being replaced by LEDs, which are semiconductor devices. Producing flickering signals with their electronics is easy, according to Gordon Povey, who is working on light communication with Harald Haas and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh.

The LEDs involved in Li-Fi would need photodetectors to receive data, but even if LEDs are not modified, hybrid systems are possible. For example, data could be downloaded using light but uploaded using radio. Moreover, light can also be used in areas which contain sensitive equipment that radio signals might interfere with, such as in aircraft and operating theatres.

This electric vehicle occupies one-third the length of a standard European parking space, and both passenger and driver enter through a fold-out windscreen. Its wheels can turn 90 degrees, which is very useful when parking. Hiriko also features an innovative navigation systems and 120 km autonomy. Denokinn, the Basque investment group backing the venture, wants to price the new car at €12,500 ($16,400).

Sales of city cars, known in the industry as “A-segment cars,” plateaued last year: their global sales have fallen from 6.2m units in 2010 to about 5.9m in 2011, according to the research outfit IHS Global Insight. It expects city-car sales to rebound slightly in 2012, to around 6.1m. The Basque start-up is going to face a big challenge, similar to the one facing its more experienced rivals, Daimler and Renault.