Foreign investment up 6.4% in 2015
Print Edition
CHINA’S foreign direct investment last year rose 6.4 percent to 781.3 billion yuan (US$126.2 billion) compared to 2014’s increase of just 1.7 percent, Ministry of Commerce data released yesterday showed.
Foreign investors set up 26,575 new enterprises on the Chinese mainland in 2015, 11.8 percent more than the year before and taking the number of foreign-invested firms to 836,404 by the end of the year with a total investment of US$1.64 trillion.
“China attracted record-high foreign investment last year, thanks to our strengthening reform efforts, which enabled investment to become bigger in size and better in quality,” the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said the value of foreign investment projects averaged US$15.3 million in 2015, 5 percent more than 2014’s US$14.5 million.
Foreign capital channeled into the service sector rose 17.3 percent to US$77.2 billion, leading FDI growth and making up 61.1 percent of the total.
Investment in high-tech manufacturing grew 9.5 percent. Industries with serious overcapacity, such as steel, cement, shipbuilding and glass, had almost no foreign investment, the ministry said.
A number of Fortune Global 500 companies, covering industries such as automobiles, energy, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, finance and software, continued to invest or raised their investment in China last year.
Among them were Audi, Volkswagen, Daimler, Lufthansa, Fiat, Volvo, Hyundai, Samsung Electronics, Intel and Itochu which launched new projects worth more than US$100 million. By the end of 2015, China was home to 2,400 foreign-invested research and development centers.
“China remains an attractive place for foreign investors due to its massive market potential, good infrastructure construction and the continuous improvement of business environment,” said Shen Danyang, a ministry spokesman.
Lian Ping, chief economist at Bank of Communications, said Shanghai’s pilot free trade zone and its three counterparts played an important role in bolstering FDI growth.
“Foreign investors have seen positive signs and gained confidence from the practice in the zones,” he said.
In the past two years, with three more free trade zones set up in China in addition to the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone established in 2013, the idea of making them a testing ground for China’s new opening-up policies has become more familiar to foreign investors.
Ministry data showed that 6,040 new foreign-invested firms were set up in three pilot zones in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, and the northern port city of Tianjin during January-November last year, while more than half the foreign investment in Shanghai went to its free trade zone.
“Reforms offering more convenient investment administration also helped Beijing and Guangdong Province see sharp increases in the attraction of foreign investment,” the ministry said.
Foreign-invested companies produced almost half of China’s outbound trade, a quarter of its industrial output, a seventh of its urban employment and a fifth of the taxes, the ministry said.
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