China makes more overseas investment in 2007

Latest official figures show that China kept the strong momentum of its outbound investment on the overseas market in 2007.

A report of China's direct overseas investment is released jointly today on Sept. 17 by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the National Bureau of Statistics and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

According to the Commerce Ministry's news release on the report, China made 26.51 billion USD of direct investment on the overseas market in 2007, which represented a growth of 25.3 percent over 2006. Non-financial investment accounted for 93.7 percent of the total and rose 40.9 percent year on year. Financial investment contributed to the remaining 6.3 percent.

By the end of 2007, some 7,000 domestic entities in China had set up more than 10,000 enterprises in 173 countries and regions around the world. That leads to 117.91 billion USD of stock of China's outbound investment, of which 85.8 percent was under the non-financial category.

In 2007, non-financial overseas entities directly funded by Chinese investors registered sales revenue of 337.6 billion USD and paid 2.94 billion USD taxes. By the end of 2007, they had employed 658,000 people with 295,000 of them of non-Chinese nationalities.

Of the 10,000 plus enterprises funded by Chinese capital on the overseas markets, 31.8 percent are in the manufacturing while 19.4 percent were in retailing and wholesaling, and 15.1 percent in commercial services.

Half of those enterprises are located in Asia with Hong Kong apparently the favorite overseas destination of the capital outflow from the Chinese mainland.

Chinese investment spread through 90 percent of the Asian market and 81 percent of the African market by the end of 2007. The US, Russia, Viet Nam, Japan, Germany, United Arab Emirates, Australia and Singapore are also major homes to Chinese funded enterprises.

Only 10.3 percent of the non-financial Chinese investors were central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and entities in 2007. But they contributed 78.5 percent of the stock of China's overseas non-financial investment. However, the ratio of SOEs in the investors' mix was down by 6 percentage points from 2006. Eleven percent of the investors were private companies.

The coastal Zhejiang province in east China is the top investor in terms of the number of overseas enterprises it has. It is followed by Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu, Beijing, Fujian, Shanghai and Heilongjiang.