Mecca for entrepreneurs draws young, talented

Guangzhou has become a mecca for entrepreneurs, with 386 companies born there every day, five of which are funded by foreign businesses.

That's according to Cai Chaolin, director of of the executive committee for the 2017 Fortune Global Forum held in Guangzhou.

Cai said that in 2016 Guangzhou was ranked as the second city in China favored by Chinese students and scholars studying abroad.

By the end of 2016, Guangzhou was home to 651,000 companies. In 2016 alone, the number of newly registered enterprises stood at 137,000, up 38.9 percent from the previous year.

The registered capital of the newly registered companies totaled 827.1 billion yuan ($125.15 billion), up 33.9 percent year-on-year.

A total of 28,000 foreign enterprises had made direct investments in Guangzhou by the end of 2016, with an actual utilized foreign capital of $81 billion.

Last year witnessed the establishment of 1,757 enterprises with foreign direct investment, a growth of 23 percent year-on-year. The capital of the foreign-funded enterprises reached $9.9 billion, a growth of 18.4 percent from 2015.

"Guangzhou has a huge market full of opportunities and potential," said Luo Zheng, an official at the Guangzhou commission of commerce.

Guangzhou's GDP is almost equal to that of Hong Kong. And the city has a population of about 20 million, Luo said.

Guangzhou is also participating in the construction of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a program for regional integration in the Pearl River Delta.