Macau Signs 109 Cooperation Deals With Portuguese and Spanish Firms in a Single Week — Sam Hou Fai's Lisbon-Madrid Tour Pitches Hengqin as the Iberian Bridge Into the Mainland

Macau's Instituto de Promoção do Comércio e do Investimento (IPIM) says the business delegation that accompanied Chief Executive Sam Hou Fai on his maiden tour of Iberia closed 109 cooperation agreements with Portuguese and Spanish firms — the result of more than 220 B2B matchmaking sessions staged across Lisbon and Madrid between 19 and 24 April. The number, disclosed in an IPIM communiqué on Saturday night, is the headline output of a state visit conceived as a deliberate post-COVID reset of Macau's role as China's Lusophone interface.

The delegation

The mission combined roughly 120 government and business representatives from Macau itself, the adjacent Hengqin / Ilha da Montanha special economic zone, and other points on the Chinese mainland. IPIM had pre-circulated invitations to 240 government and business contacts across Portugal and Spain ahead of two formal promotion sessions. In country, the delegation visited 16 entities spanning economic and commercial departments, technology firms and integrated-health projects — sectors where Macau and Hengqin are hunting for European partners with a mainland-China play.

IPIM's communiqué frames the pitch in concrete terms: Macau plus Hengqin can "create an efficient and convenient bridge to support Portuguese and Spanish companies expanding into the Chinese market". The implicit asks of European firms are licensing, joint ventures and technology transfer; the offer is a fast-track regulatory environment and proximity to Guangdong's manufacturing base.

The Lisbon agenda

Sam Hou Fai — the first Macau Chief Executive fluent in Portuguese — used his Lisbon stop to anchor the trip in formal state diplomacy. He met President António José Seguro, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, the Assembleia da República's president José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, and the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça's president João Cura Mariano. The mix is unusual in modern Lusophone diplomacy because it combines an executive-branch and judicial-branch programme in the same week — a signal that Macau wants to reinforce both commercial and legal-cooperation channels with the country whose code-based legal tradition it inherited.

The Brussels ask

From Madrid the trip continued to Geneva and Brussels, where Sam Hou Fai used a meeting with European Parliament Vice-President Younous Omarjee to make a more politically significant request: that the EU help relaunch the long-dormant EU-Macau Joint Commission, whose 24th meeting had been scheduled for 2020 and was indefinitely postponed by the pandemic. The Joint Commission is the formal mechanism through which Brussels and Macau coordinate trade, customs cooperation and people-to-people exchanges; its revival would be the first substantive EU-Macau institutional engagement since the 1992 cooperation agreement Macau signed with the European Economic Community before the 1999 handover.

On Friday, Sam Hou Fai had also asked the EU to support the diffusion of Portuguese-language teaching in Macau, citing a structural shortage of qualified Portuguese-Chinese translators — a workforce gap that is increasingly visible in legal, regulatory and commercial work between China and the eight Lusophone nations.

What it means for Portugal

For Portuguese firms the immediate read is opportunity-shaped. The 109 protocols are mostly framework agreements — statements of intent rather than executed contracts — but they serve as the legal scaffolding that lets a Portuguese SME open a Hengqin entity, license a product into mainland China through a Macau holding, or join a tech or health partnership in the Greater Bay Area. The political read is more ambivalent: Lisbon has spent the year recalibrating its China posture in line with Brussels' tougher line on Beijing, including ongoing EU sanctions packages touching Chinese firms. The Sam Hou Fai itinerary is a counterweight — a reminder that Macau's special status under the Basic Law gives it room to negotiate with the EU even when the Brussels-Beijing relationship is strained.