The Financial Times has reported that global investors are eager to return to China to do business.
Personnel exchanges and business travel are expected to be accelerated, according to some countries' chambers of commerce in China.
Many foreign companies said they had begun planning high-level group visits to China, which could help restart projects and locate new investment opportunities.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that business people would once again visit China for its fast-growing market.
According to data from the ministry of commerce, China's foreign direct investment (FDI) surged 6.2 percent on a year-on-year basis to 999.98 billion yuan ($147.65 billion) in 2020. The growth rate reached 14.9 percent to a record high of 1.15 trillion yuan in 2021. In the first 11 months of 2022, China's FDI exceeded the level for the whole of 2021, with a year-on-year increase of 9.9 percent, showing that the Chinese market always attracts foreign capital.
Foreign investors are also attracted by China's irreplaceable industrial chain advantages.
According to Apple's supplier list for the fiscal year 2021, released in October 2022, 150 of about 190 suppliers have factories on the Chinese mainland.
Zeiss Group, a leading enterprise in the fields of optics and optoelectronics, on October 18, 2022 started construction of a new research and development (R&D) and production base in Suzhou, in east China's Jiangsu province. Xie Lei, the COO of Carl Zeiss (Shanghai), said the supporting advantages of the local mature industrial chain were one of the main reasons for Zeiss' investment.
Basically, 80 percent of the suppliers within 200 kilometres could become good partners with the company, Xie said.
Moreover, the first plant of the BASF (Guangdong) integrated base project was officially put into operation, the large-scale upgrade project of the BMW Brilliance production base officially opened in Shenyang, in northeast China's Liaoning province, and Panasonic Group transferred more business segments such as cold chain equipment production and sales to China.
The country has all the industrial categories in the United Nations industrial classification. Innovation is the first driving force leading its development, and China's continuous promotion of high-level opening-up also attracts foreign investment.
On January 1, China officially implemented the 2022 version of the catalogue of encouraged industries for foreign investment. The new version of the catalogue has a total of 1 474 entries, a net increase of 239 entries and 167 revisions compared with the 2020 edition, the largest number of additions in recent years. This will provide more space for foreign capital to develop in China and bring more generous returns.
Recently, financial services companies including Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley raised their forecasts for China's economic growth in 2023. A number of international economic institutions predict that as China's epidemic prevention and control enters a new stage, the overall economic operation will rebound this year. Some analysts pointed out that China's economy has strong resilience, great potential and vitality, and its role as an "accelerator" for the world economy is irreplaceable.
* This article was first published by CGTN