BEIJING: Multinational companies have vowed to deepen ties in China, as the country’s new industrialization push brings vast new opportunities in advanced manufacturing and digital transformation amid sluggish global economic recovery.
Despite a globally subdued investment sentiment, executives of foreign companies said they are inspired by China’s promise to remove all restrictions on foreign investment access to manufacturing. They also said the country’s huge market, as well as favorable government policies that spur innovation, hold great appeal.
Their comments came after President Xi Jinping said during a keynote speech on Oct 18 at the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing that China “will remove all restrictions on foreign investment access in the manufacturing sector”.
Xi also stressed in an instruction in September the importance of high-quality development in promoting new industrialization to lay a strong material and technological foundation for Chinese modernization.
Denis Depoux, global managing director of consultancy Roland Berger, said new industrialization is one of the key drivers leading China’s future development, and this will generate new opportunities for multinationals. “Thanks to the improved productivity, broad industrial clusters, and well-established infrastructure, China was, is and will remain the factory of the world,” Depoux said.
“The combination of a broad local market and the strong legacy export base make China difficult to replace. We believe that China’s fundamentals remain strong, in spite of a difficult transition in the short term. The global factory is now producing more added-value products because of the massive new industrialization efforts,” he added.
Yu Shaohua, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that replacing traditional industrialization with new industrialization will inject new vitality into the high-quality development of the real economy, as digital technologies such as 5G, industrial internet, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are getting increasingly intertwined with manufacturing. “Advancing the deep integration of the digital economy and the traditional industrial economy is an important path to achieve new industrialization, which will spawn new infrastructure, new application models and a new industrial ecology,” Yu said.
That is in line with what foreign companies are eyeing to tap into China, which boasts a complete supply chain support system and a strong logistics system, in addition to its big market and government policies that spur innovation, experts said.
New industrialization is the top area for more potential foreign investment, followed by green technology and other domains, according to a survey earlier this year of more than 390 foreign-funded enterprises and foreign business associations by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
