Over the past 40 years, Shanghai, with 0.06% of China’s land and 2% of the overall population, has attracted more than one-tenth of the country’s actually used foreign capital.
Among some 60,000 foreign-invested enterprises, 767 multinational companies have made their regional headquarters in Shanghai, including 112 Fortune 500 companies, announced Hua Yuan, director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce at a press conference on December 28.
As the city with the highest concentration of regional headquarters of multinational companies on the Chinese mainland, Shanghai has been a pioneer in promoting foreign investment, such as expanding its opening up and advancing management system reform to establish the country's first pilot free trade zone and put forward the one-stop service philosophy.
Foreign-invested enterprises have greatly fueled Shanghai’s economic growth, generating more than 1/4 of Shanghai’s GDP, 1/3 of tax revenue[It would be nice to know what that designated size is, or else it’s pretty meaningless. You could put it in brackets.], and 1/5 jobs.
Moreover, as the proportion of foreign investment in modern service industries, advanced manufacturing, and strategic emerging industries has kept increasing, the construction of a modern industrial system in Shanghai has been accelerated.
According to Mr. Hua, foreign-invested businesses are an important part of promoting technological innovation. A total of 479 R&D centers have been established in the past four decades and about half of the R&D investment of industrial enterprises with annual sales of more than 2 million yuan in Shanghai comes from foreign-invested companies.