Bureau's teams helped to keep companies running

Ningbo's bureau of commerce in has promoted the resumption of foreign trade and actually made gains during the COVID-19 outbreak.

To learn about the difficulties of trading in a lockdown, the local government established special working teams for foreign trade and living services, and hosted meetings.

A total of 100 teams were sent to companies to provide training, help tackle a variety of difficulties and give timely feedback.

To date, the local government has served 513 companies, collected 542 problems and solved 462 of them.

To facilitate imports and exports at a time of increased risk, the city tightened its coordination with ports, including Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, freight-forwarding and airline companies, and encouraged foreign companies to book transportation in advance.

With five major banks, Ningbo has given credit lines worth 39.11 billion yuan ($5.5 billion) to 3,270 foreign trade companies and made loans of 17.53 billion yuan to 3,121 foreign trade companies as of May 25.

As offline exhibitions are postponed because of the pandemic, Ningbo provided online international expo services.

In April, the city hosted three export commodities exhibitions online, which attracted more than 600 companies and led to more than 230 business negotiations.

Besides this, Ningbo is cooperating with China's e-commerce platforms, such as Pinduoduo and Taobao, to help foreign companies sell their products domestically. The city had 4,200 foreign traders expanding their businesses in China via e-commerce platforms during the outbreak.

The city also created an overseas marketing service system, which allows companies to purchase goods overseas, transport them to domestic bonded warehouses and then sell to customers.

In the first four months of 2020, Ningbo's cross-border e-commerce imports totaled 7.38 billion yuan, up 42.1 percent year-on-year, ranking No 1 in China.

Once the pandemic is over, Ningbo plans to launch a series of investment promotion activities in Europe, the United States, Japan, Singapore and elsewhere.

During the outbreak period, the city hosted online investment promotion activities and online signing ceremonies.

In March, the city launched an online signing ceremony for 62 key projects with total investment of 39.53 billion yuan.

Looking ahead, the local government plans to cooperate with payment agencies and banks to host consumption stimulation activities. So far, it has attracted more than 100,000 merchants which is expected to lead to direct consumption worth 270 million yuan, the government said.