The State Council Information Office held a press conference at 3 pm on June 22. Vice Minister of Commerce and Deputy Representative for International Trade Negotiations and other relevant responsible persons introduced relevant policies and measures for the use of foreign capital to stabilize and promote excellence, and answered reporters’ questions.
When answering reporters’ questions about the current situation of stabilizing foreign investment and the next direction of efforts to stabilize the stock and expand the increment, the Vice Minister of Commerce said that in recent years, external unfavorable factors such as weak global economic growth, geopolitical conflicts, and the decline of global cross-border direct investment have had a certain impact on my country’s attraction of foreign investment. However, these effects are mainly reflected in the fluctuations in the increment of foreign investment and have little impact on existing foreign investment.
From the perspective of foreign capital stock, it can be analyzed from three aspects.
First, in terms of scale, by the end of 2025, the number of foreign-funded enterprises in my country will reach 533,000, with an average annual growth rate of 4.5% compared with the end of 2020; the scale of existing foreign investment is close to US$4 trillion, with an average annual growth rate of 3.6% within five years.
According to incomplete statistics, more than 8,000 foreign-funded companies will increase investment in China in 2025, a year-on-year increase of more than 10%. In the first to five months of this year, nearly 4,000 foreign-funded companies made additional investments.
The second is the operating situation. During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, the operating income of foreign-invested enterprises reached 262.7 trillion yuan, and the profit was 21.4 trillion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of about 5% for both indicators.
From January to May this year, the foreign trade import and export of foreign-invested enterprises reached 866.3 billion US dollars, accounting for 29.1% of the country’s foreign trade import and export, nearly 30%.
The “China Business Environment Survey” recently released by the U.S.-China Business Council shows that nearly three-quarters of companies registered in the United States invest or do business in China, and their revenue in China will be stable or grow in fiscal year 2025. 92% of U.S.-owned companies made profits in China last year.
The third is the contribution of foreign investment to our country’s economy. Since 2020, foreign-funded enterprises have contributed about 2.5 trillion yuan in tax revenue every year, accounting for about 1/7 of the national tax revenue; in the past five years, foreign-funded enterprises have employed an average of more than 30 million people annually; from 2023 to 2025, the industrial added value of foreign-invested enterprises above designated size has maintained growth for three consecutive years. Foreign-invested enterprises have been deeply integrated with local production and supply chains, playing a positive role in the overall stability of China’s production and supply chain.
From the perspective of the increase in foreign investment, although foreign investment has come in and out, the overall incoming is greater than the outgoing.
At present, China ranks first among developing countries in attracting foreign investment and is the world’s major cross-border investment destination.
In recent years, the overall increase in actual utilization of foreign capital has remained above US$100 billion, although there have been some fluctuations.
From January to May this year, my country’s actual utilization of foreign investment fell by 8.6% year-on-year, but the decline was 4.6 percentage points narrower than the same period last year, and the investment structure has been further optimized, indicating that the increase in foreign investment is generally stable and that China is still relatively resilient in attracting foreign investment.
Generally speaking, my country’s stock of foreign investment is rising steadily, and incremental foreign investment is generally stable. Foreign investment in China shows the characteristics of “stable scale”, “stable operations”, “stable contribution” and “stable expectations”.
In the next step, we will continue to make efforts to stabilize stock, expand volume, and improve quality, and a series of pragmatic measures have been introduced.
In the manufacturing sector, the restrictive measures in the manufacturing sector in the negative list for foreign investment access have been “cleared”, and the next step is to focus on solving the “quasi-operation” issue after “access”; in the service sector, in accordance with the outline deployment of the “15th Five-Year Plan”, the focus will be on promoting market access and open areas in the service industry, and on the premise of coordinating development and security, continue to expand opening up, create a better business environment for foreign investment, and consolidate the basic base for attracting foreign investment.
