China's Hainan posts strong foreign investment growth

With free trade port policies helping woo investors, China's southern island province of Hainan reported strong foreign investment growth last year.

Preliminary statistics showed that the actual use of foreign investment in Hainan totaled about 3 billion U.S. dollars in 2020, doubling the figure of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars for 2019, according to the provincial department of commerce on Wednesday.

After the province started building itself into a free trade port, more foreign investment is going into the modern services sector.

A total of 909 newly established foreign-funded enterprises, or 90 percent of all new foreign-funded companies, are in the services sector. They used 2.65 billion U.S. dollars of foreign investment, accounting for 87 percent of all.

Eighty countries and regions invested here, doubling the figure from 2019, said the department.

China released a master plan for the Hainan free trade port on June 1 last year, aiming to build the province into a globally influential, high-level, free trade port by the middle of the century.