Strong foreign trade growth benefits Zhuhai's economy

Zhuhai's import and export volume surged 24 percent to 189 billion yuan ($29.6 billion) from January to July, 15.4 percentage points higher than the average national rate, according to the Zhuhai Municipal Bureau of Commerce.

Data as of July 2018 shows that Zhuhai has attracted investors from 58 countries and regions and the actual use of foreign capital has accumulated $16.26 billion. Forty-six overseas Fortune 500 companies have invested in 82 enterprises in Zhuhai, the development of which resulted in the actual absorption of foreign investment of $3.04 billion.

During the first seven months of this year, Zhuhai has completed 103.31 billion yuan worth of imports and exports of general trade, up 31.3 percent. The volume accounts for 54.7 percent of foreign trade value. The import and export value of electronic machine and high-tech products rose by 26 percent and 35.6 percent to 125.1 billion yuan and 69.4 billion yuan respectively, resulting from an overall improvement of R & D capacity across Zhuhai.

It is worth mentioning that the high-tech products sold overseas from January to July were valued at 40.08 billion yuan, a staggering increase of 21.3 percent. It accounted for 37 percent of the city's total imports, a larger proportion compared to the same period of last year.

It is convincing that the good momentum of Zhuhai's foreign trade has been consolidated this year, according to an expert. The city's competitiveness in the level, returns, prospects and development of foreign trade scored high in an evaluation conducted by the China Customs last year, which put Zhuhai at seventh place in the list of top 100 foreign trade cities in the country.

Zhuhai is still working hard to speed up progress.

For example, commercial filing and business registration for foreign-funded enterprises which previously had to be handled separately can now be dealt with at a single government service window. It takes merely one day to put the enterprises on record, another reform effective since June 31, according to a local official.

Benefiting from such facilitation measures, the Hengqin Free Trade Zone has attracted the registration of more than 50,000 companies with a total capital of more than 2.3 trillion yuan. Among them are 43 Fortune 500 companies and 71 China Top 500 enterprises, according to statistics.