Since the beginning of the year, the Ministry of Commerce has been sticking to the keynote of seeking progress in stability, adapting to the new normal of economic development actively, and following the goals of “stabilizing the scale and speed of foreign investment, and promoting the quality of foreign investment”. The foreign investment environment has been further optimized. The official from the Department of Foreign Investment Administration pointed out that, China’s input of FDI in the first eight months showed the following features:
1. Foreign investment saw a general stability. On one aspect, the scale of foreign investment enjoyed a steady growth. In January-August, 16,827 foreign-invested enterprises were set in China, up 10.7% year on year; the contractual FDI reached RMB 1.25111 trillion (US$ 204.11 billion), up 34.8% year on year; the actual utilized FDI amounted to RMB 525.28 billion (US$ 85.34 billion), up 9.2% year on year. Some famous transnational enterprises including Das Auto, Audi, Daimler and Itochu continued their additional investment to China. On the other aspect, the investment from the source of foreign investment generally remained steady. The actual utilized FDI from the top 10 countries/regions reached US$ 80.46 billion, accounting for 94.3% of the total actual utilized FDI, up 9.5% year on year. Among them, the actual investment from Hong Kong, France and Macao saw an obvious growth. The total actual investment from the EU 28 countries to China was up 14.4% year on year.
2. The industrial structure was further optimized. The input FDI of the high-tech service industry and high-tech manufacturing industry continued the growth. In January-August, the input FDI of the service industry was up 20.1% year on year. In it, the actual utilized FDI of the high-tech service industry reached US$ 5.51 billion, up 59.1% year on year, with that of research and development and design up 51.7% year on year; that of information technology service up 18.2% year on year; that of scientific research service up 113.7% year on year. The actual utilized FDI of the high-tech manufacturing industry reached US$ 6.57 billion, up 9.9% year on year, accounting for 24.1% of the total actual utilized FDI of the manufacturing industry. In it, the actual utilized FDI of electronic components manufacturing was up 28% year on year; that of integrated circuit manufacturing was up 80.3% year on year; that of telecommunication equipment manufacturing was up 176.1% year on year; and that of aviation and equipments manufacturing was up 66.2% year on year.
3. Foreign investment acquisition was active. The scale and proportion of foreign investment acquisition were promoted largely. In January-August, 871 foreign invested enterprises were set through acquisition, with the contractual FDI US$ 16.35 billion, and the actual utilized FDI US$ 14.55 billion, up 15.4%, 144.2% and 297.7% year on year respectively. In January-August, the proportion of acquisition in the total actual utilized FDI was up from 4.7% of the same period last year to 17.1%.
4. The scale of termination and reduction of foreign investment continued the decrease. In January-August, 5,187 foreign invested enterprises were terminated, and 1,684 foreign invested enterprises saw a capital reduction, down 22.4% and 18.2% year on year respectively. The related contractual FDI were US$ 22.47 billion and US$ 11.86 billion respectively, down 24% and 12.9% year on year respectively. In terms of the numbers of enterprises and the scale of the capital amount, the “input” was far larger than the “output”.
The official from the Department of Foreign Investment Administration said that, in August, the national actual utilized FDI was RMB 54.2 billion (US$ 8.71 billion), up 22% year on year.
