By Yuling Chen, iChongqing News

Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality has made new breakthroughs in the construction of China (Chongqing) Pilot Free Trade Zone (CFTZ). What are these achievements?

Over 12,000 enterprises settled

According to the Chongqing Municipal Commission of Commerce, by the end of last year, 12,768 enterprises have settled in the pilot free trade zone, accounting for 9.4% of the city's total. Their registered capital was RMB 128.208 billion (about USD 18.89 billion), accounting for 18.2% of the municipal total.

Among them, 221 new registered foreign-funded enterprises, accounting for 22.8% of the city's total. Moreover, the registered capital of USD 904 million accounted for 6.9% of Chongqing’s total.

Chongqing FTZ has introduced 983 projects with a total amount of contracts (agreements) signed worth RMB 12.129 billion. The total foreign trade volume of Chongqing accounts for two-thirds of the city, and the actual use of foreign capital accounts for one-quarter of the city.

Cases promoted nationwide

Among the 151 reform and pilot tasks in CFTZ, 129 have been implemented. CFTZ has formed 141 innovation systems in four areas of investment, trade, finance and supervision to oversee registration and post-registration. Moreover, it made achievements of 13 typical innovation cases and 34 institutional innovation.

The country has adopted and promoted CFTZ experiences and cases, including supervision innovation of self-filing, the self-determined cycle of canceling after verification, self-paid tax and simplified business approval procedures. In addition,“ international logistics construction” and “implementation of railway transportation letter of credit settlement” have been promoted nationwide.

Chongqing has opened the world's first cross-border rail transport bill of lading and documentary international letter of credit and took important steps in exploring the international land trade rules.

Facilitation of customs clearance at the port significantly improved

Chongqing FTZ has implemented the negative list management of foreign investment in a comprehensive way. It has accelerated the integrated reform of customs clearance and reduced the business coordination time by more than 50%.

The “single window” of international trade was put into operation, and the customs clearance time was compressed by one third.

The traditional processing trade industry has accelerated its upgrading, and exports of spare parts and smart terminals have continued to grow.

The new trade business sprang up and the financing lease and global maintenance started smoothly. The bonded aircraft leasing took the lead in breaking through the third batch of free trade pilot zones. The cross-border e-commerce and automobile import scale continued to expand. All were among the top in the central and western regions.

Source: CQCB

 

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