Boosting Private Investment

Clearing Forex Regulations

China’s foreign exchange regulator has abolished 17 regulations on forex management to promote trade and investment facilitation.

As a part of the government’s reform to improve regulations and services, clearing the outdated regulations will help market entities better understand the country’s forex policies, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange said in a statement.

The abolished regulations used to center on aspects including import forex payment, trade in service and foreign debt, as well as the forex management for financial institutions, companies and individuals.

The authority has also scrapped the requirements on the quota and account validity for front-end expenses of foreign direct investment in two regulations to make direct investment into China easier. China has intensified efforts to encourage private sectors to participate in infrastructure investment in search of healthy economic growth.

By the end of September, at the local level, 1,222 infrastructure projects worth at least $362 billion have been promoted among private companies, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s economic planning agency.

Private companies have shown cooperation intention in 150 projects worth at least $42 billion, the NDRC said in a statement on its website.

At the end of September, private companies inked eight airport construction agreements with investment totaling nearly $7.2 billion. Infrastructure projects comprise of energy, transportation, highway, garbage disposal facilities and reservoirs.

17 regulations on forex management abolished by China’s foreign exchange regulator

Protecting Investors’ Interests

China’s top securities regulator vows to protect investors’ interests, especially those of small and medium-sized investors.

China will make efforts to establish an open, fair, just and transparent capital market ecosystem to boosting investors’ confidence in capital market’s reform and opening up and regulatory measures.

Liu Shiyu, Chairman of China Securities Regulatory Commission, said the commission will always shoulder the mission of protecting the legitimate rights and interests of investors, persist in the direction of marketization, legalization and internationalization, and continue to promote in-depth reform and opening up of the capital market in an all-round way.

Growing Overseas Profit

The earning ability of Chinese companies operating overseas remained robust as their profit jumped by 52 percent year on year to $137.8 billion in 2017, the Ministry of Commerce said.

Officials said the growing figure is an inevitable outcome of China’s economic growth in a new development stage, as the country’s outbound direct investment has been spread evenly across many industrial sectors, particularly those related to the real economy, such as goods manufacturing, infrastructure projects and service business.

By the end of 2017, Chinese companies had invested in and established more than 39,200 companies in 189 countries and regions worldwide, with a total asset value of around $6 trillion, data released by the NBS show.

Potential Outbound Tourism Market

China has the world’s largest number of outbound tourists, official data showed. The number of trips made by Chinese people to other countries and regions reached 135 million in 2016, compared to 5 million in 1995, according to data recently released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). This represents an average annual increase of 17.6 percent over 21 years, said the NBS. China has been the country with most outbound tourists in annual terms since 2013, according to the NBS. China’s outbound tourism market is estimated to increase by 5 percent annually on average in the coming years, bringing the number of outbound tourists to 157 million in 2020, according to the China Tourism Academy, a think tank under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves in September

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