On the morning of August 31, 2006, Chairman Wu Bangguo of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress who is paying an official good-will visit to Brazil attended the opening ceremony of the annual meeting of China-Brazil Entrepreneurs Committee and delivered an important speech entitled Businesses Are the Important Players of Economic and Trade Cooperation.

After briefly reviewing the achievements of China-Brazil economic and trade cooperation, Wu listed a large number of facts, comprehensively analyzing the characteristics and advantages of China and Brazil in the fields of energy and mineral resources, infrastructure construction, new and high technologies and traditional trade and pointing out that China and Brazil share strong economic complementarities, sound cooperation foundation and huge development potential and especially an unprecedented enthusiasm for expanding economic and trade cooperation and raising cooperation quality and level.

Wu stressed that the key to translate the strong aspiration for and huge potential of cooperation is that businesses should make full use of their role as the major players of economic and trade cooperation to push forward the cooperation on a number of large projects. He expressed hope that the businesses of both countries use their advantages respectively to actively explore the new ways of business cooperation, open new areas of investment cooperation, expand the two-way direct investment, extend the bilateral economic cooperation from trade in goods to investment, industrial and technological cooperation and raise the quality of China-Brazil economic and trade relations.

Wu lastly noted that the two governments and the parties concerned should take strengthening the cooperation of businesses as the priority of deepening China-Brazil economic and trade cooperation, keep improving the investment environment, give full play to the role of such bilateral mechanisms as the China-Brazil Economic and Trade Joint Committee, coordinate and settle the problems of bilateral economic and trade cooperation, especially business cooperation in a timely manner and create favorable conditions and greater convenience for the bilateral business cooperation and cooperation on large projects.

It is said that China-Brazil Entrepreneurs Committee is the first cooperation organization initiated by businesses between China and Latin America and composed of a large number of well-known businesses and entrepreneurs from China and Brazil. Since its establishment two years ago the committee has made great contributions to building the understanding of businesses of the two countries and promoting the development of bilateral economic and trade relations.