Organizers had announced in late 2020 that they would move the event to the Malaysian city of Kuala Lumpur, saying they wanted to seek opportunities in Southeast Asia’s fast-growing tech scene.
Now, “Hong Kong has once again won as the host city of Rise for the coming five years,” the event’s organizers said in a joint statement Thursday with the Hong Kong Tourism Board.
The event next March will be staged in-person. Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Edward Yau touted this as “a testimony of Hong Kong’s success to containing the pandemic and keeping infection rate among the lowest in the world, thereby giving international event organizers confidence that they can stage their events here safely.”
“I’m very excited,” he said in a statement Thursday.
Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder and CEO of Rise, noted in a statement that the event had “grown to what it is today after five successful years in the city.” Rise is billed as Asia’s largest tech gathering, and attracted some 16,000 attendees and more than 350 speakers at its most recent conference in 2019.
The decision also awards Hong Kong a small victory as it continues to face questions over its future as an international center due to stringent Covid-19 quarantine rules, which are some of the toughest on the planet.
— Hanna Ziady, Diksha Madhok and Carly Walsh contributed to this report.
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