City welcomes more transnational enterprises

Certificates were awarded a new batch of 30 regional headquarters and 10 research and development centers of transnational enterprises in Shanghai on Monday.

Among them were five Global Fortune 500 enterprises – Amgen Biomedical, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo from the United States, Swiss company ABB Group, and Sony from Japan.

ABB Robotics began to promote industrial robot applications in the Chinese market in 1994, and has carried out R&D and production work in China since 2005, making it the first transnational industrial robot company to conduct local R&D and manufacturing in China.

"Our new plant in the Kangqiao area of the Pudong New Area, with a total investment of US$150 million, will begin operating in the first quarter of 2022, when our global R&D center will move in and expand in scale," said Liang Rui, vice president of the group.

It will be ABB's largest R&D center in the world in terms of personnel, investment and scale, Liang said.

PepsiCo, one of the first foreign companies to enter China, and its business partners have invested more than 53 billion yuan in China over the past 10 years. It is now seeking new development in digitalization and automatization, and has built strategic partnerships with several e-commerce platforms.

Metsä Fibre from Finland, a producer of wood-based bio products such as pulp, sawn timber, biochemicals and bioenergy, also decided to set up its Asia-Pacific management headquarters in Shanghai in view of the rapid growth of the Chinese and APAC markets.

"Our imports in Asia have exceeded 1 billion tons cumulatively, of which 70 percent were imported into China," said Song Wangqiu, president of Metsä Fibre China, highlighting the importance of the Chinese market, which was why it chose to set up its APAC headquarters in the country.

"Annual sales in China have reached about 800 million to 1 billion euros, accounting for a fifth of the group's global total, and is growing by double-digit percentages each year."

The company has moved its offices to Lujiazui area and completed the relocation of the entire business into Pudong.

"Aside from the normal prevention and control of COVID-19, Shanghai is striving to promote stable and healthy economic and social development, and its attraction for foreign investment has continued to increase this year," said Zong Ming, the city's vice mayor.

More foreign-funded enterprises have newly settled in Shanghai, while the contract value and actual use of foreign capital both rose in January-April.

Actual foreign capital reached US$7.773 billion in the first four months, an increase of 20.3 percent year on year and up 25.2 percent compared with the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, 20 regional headquarters and seven R&D centers of transnational companies have been set up, bringing the total numbers to 791 and 488 respectively.