The beautiful coastline of Xiamen. [Photo/CHINA DAILY]

New action plan aims to keep increasing the strength of business environment in city

Xiamen, a coastal city in East China's Fujian province, has continuously optimized its business environment by catering to the needs of market entities and taking reform and innovation as its driving force.

The city recently issued the Xiamen City's Action Plan to Further Enhance the Business Environment and Facilitate High-Quality Development of Enterprises, stimulating market vitality and creating a lasting and strong "gravitational field" for greater economic growth.

Consolidating the achievements of the previous five rounds of reform of the business environment, the action plan, consisting of 162 specific measures in 28 different areas, focuses on enhancing the sense of gain for market entities as the main evaluation criteria. It aims to build a competitive and orderly market environment, establish fair and just "rule of law" principles, realize efficient and convenient administrative management, and upgrade the internal and external circulation system.

In 2022, Xiamen added 172,000 market entities; and in the first three quarters of this year, the city attracted 128,200 new market entities, bringing the total number of market entities to 902,900, up 8.88 percent year-on-year. Xiamen has ranked among the top in the national business environment evaluation by the National Development and Reform Commission for three consecutive years.

"The reform of the business environment has entered the second half," said Xu Zhiduan, a professor at Xiamen University's School of Management.

He said that the first half of the business environment reform mainly focused on addressing the common issues of land, labor, capital, technology and data. "The second half will depend on customized and personalized innovations in the business environment. Xiamen's action plan is continuously exploring policies in this regard and will enhance the city's core competitiveness."

The city's innovative measures include promoting "one-stop" services for individuals and businesses throughout their lifecycle, conducting pilot reforms in a multimodal transport bill of lading, and continuing to deepen the construction of the "single window" for international trade.

The industrial park of Deppon Express in Jimei district, Xiamen, is an important hub for the company, with the increasing number of freight trucks and workers at the park representing its fast-paced development.

Rao Haiyan, head of public affairs at Deppon Express in Fujian, said since the project landed in Xiamen, both the speed of construction and development have exceeded expectations.

"We deeply feel the attention and support that Xiamen gives to business development," Rao said.

The project took a total of 25 working days from filing to approval completion, and only 11.5 working days from land acquisition filing to start of construction, setting a record for Deppon in terms of the fastest time from land acquisition to commencement of construction nationwide.

This is a typical example of the deep integration and efficient coordination of reform and development in Xiamen.

Just like Deppon Express, Epiworld International also deeply feels the effect of the "Xiamen speed".

The research and development as well as industrialization projects of Epiworld International's 6 to 8-inch Semiconductor Integrated Circuit epitaxial wafers only took 23 days from establishment to the start of construction, reducing the average time for similar projects of the same scale by 207 days compared to the period before the reform.

In Xiamen, the reform of the business environment resonates with the actual demands of business entities.

To better tap into the smart car market, Xiamen-based Yaxon Network has increased its efforts in technological transformation and innovation, resulting in a greater need for funds. The technology innovation fund launched by the Xiamen finance bureau has provided the company with a low-cost loan of more than 120 million yuan ($16.78 million).

"The company only needs to pay an annual interest rate of 2 percent for the loan, which not only supports the development of the enterprise, but also strengthens our confidence and determination," said Yu Yun, deputy general manager of Yaxon Network.

Xiamen has issued 80 billion yuan of funds to support the development of enterprises, benefiting more than 10,000 market entities and helping enterprises save nearly 2 billion yuan each year.

Since the beginning of this year, the Xiamen market supervision bureau has focused on the digital transformation of government functions to help the city create a first-class business environment with marketization, rule of law and internationalization.

It enhances the innovation momentum of business entities and improves the effectiveness of market supervision and law enforcement.

The bureau pioneered the application model of "information verification and material auto-generation", automatically correlating key application elements such as company name, business scope and address information. When the applicant handles the business license registration, the system will intelligently match its relevant license information and complete the approval without manual intervention.