FILE PHOTO: Employees work on the production line of American infant product and toy manufacturer Kids2 Inc. at a factory in Jiujiang, Jiangxi province, China June 22, 2021. Picture taken June 22, 2021. REUTERS/Gabriel Crossley/File Photo
BEIJING: Multinational companies (MNCs) have vowed to deepen ties in China, as the country’s new industrialisation push brings vast new opportunities in advanced manufacturing and digital transformation amid sluggish global economic recovery.
Despite 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 favourable government policies that spur innovation, hold great appeal.
Their comments came after President Xi Jinping said during a keynote speech at the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation here 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 industrialisation to lay a strong material and technological foundation for Chinese modernisation.
Denis Depoux, global managing director of consultancy Roland Berger, said new industrialisation 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 industrialisation efforts,” he added.
Yu Shaohua, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that replacing traditional industrialisation with new industrialisation 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 industrialisation, 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 industrialisation 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.
Lily Wang, head of the engineering plastics business unit at Covestro, said the German chemical company will continue to invest and expand in the Chinese market, given its “vibrancy, development potential and pace”.
Earlier this month, Covestro announced that its first dedicated line for the mechanical recycling of polycarbonates began operations in Shanghai.
Its cumulative investment in China exceeded 3.9bil as of the end of 2022. — China Daily/ANN
