Reforms boost business landscape of Xiamen

Almost 100,000 new market entities created in the first seven months of this year

Xiamen in East China's Fujian province has seen a stable increase in business registrations this year, thanks to its continuous efforts to optimize the corporate environment, improve government services and deepen market-oriented reform and innovation.

Statistics from the city's administration for market regulation show that Xiamen added 98,963 new market entities from January to July, up 16 percent over the same period of 2021. As of July 31, the number of registered market entities exceeded 810,000 in the city, up 9.7 percent year-on-year.

Of them, 407,400 are domestic enterprises, up 4.1 percent; 13,357 are foreign-funded companies, up 2.7 percent; and 393,900 are self-employed individuals, up 16.5 percent.

Xiamen authorities in market supervision and regulation have promoted the reform of reducing paperwork, approval procedures, time and fees for business registration, in a bid to relax market access for both domestic and foreign businesses, and inject more dynamism into market entities.

Currently, the time period for items requiring administrative licensing has been shortened to 10 percent of the national legal time limit.

The market regulation administration has cooperated with banks and tax and public security departments to set up an online platform, through which all registration procedures including invoice application, engraving seals, and opening bank accounts and tax accounts can be done. This year, nearly 88 percent of companies in Xiamen have registered via the platform, ranking first in the province.

Also, the platform provides standardized and unified expressions of business scope, so that applicants can better understand the registration rules.

On the basis of the platform, Xiamen has promoted the reform and innovation of "smart government services". It has launched several WeChat public service accounts like "i Xiamen" to take the provincial lead in realizing the online handling of administrative approval items in the food, drug and medical equipment sectors.

To improve administrative approval, the city has advanced reforms over separating operating permits from business licenses, as part of the efforts to put an end to "letting companies in but not letting them do business". The initiative has also helped to establish simple, efficient, fair and transparent business rules, officials said.

Over the past year, the separation of operating permits and business licenses has benefited more than 10,000 market entities, and saved more than 20,000 days of service time.

Also, in the industries of supermarkets, pharmacies and maternal and baby products, which are closely related to people's daily lives, Xiamen has integrated a number of administrative licenses into a comprehensive license to assist in their market access and operations.

For operators of food vending machines, they need only apply for a food business license in any district of the city, and can site the vending machines anywhere in the city after reporting to the market supervision department where the license is located.

Since July, Xiamen has provided business consulting services to operators who want to apply for food business licenses. This helps them reduce the loss of blind investments and improves efficiency in processing follow-up examinations and approvals.

For companies and individual businesses that have not carried out production and operation activities for a long time, or failed to pay taxes, the city has simplified cancellation procedures. It allows them to use the Xiamen commercial subject registration and credit information platform to publicize information of a liquidation team and release an announcement for creditors.

In the first half of 2022, a total of 8,794 market entities in the city canceled registration via the simplified procedures, an increase of 27 percent year-on-year.