Foreign businesses explore new export front in Jiading District
The business deal signing ceremony held at Jiading District government on Wednesday.
Ingo Matter, director of Absolute Racing China Co, hopes motor racing in China could be brought onto the international level with the establishment of a new bonded zone in Jiading District on Wednesday.
Upgraded from Jiading Export Processing Zone, the new “comprehensive bonded zone” will implement highly flexible free-trade policies to drive exports and imports that benefit international businesses like Matter’s which provided racing services.
“Currently there are not many manufacturers of such cars in China, and we hope to change that in the future, but to start, we need to address the problem that it’s very hard to get the existing cars into the country,” he said. “The new zone could make it easier for racing car imports.”
On Wednesday, the zone singed a deal with Ferrari and Porsche and other partners to establish a bonded racing car exhibition and transaction center, which is expected to facilitate racing car imports into China. Jiading is home to Shanghai International Circuit, the best motor racing circuit in China and one of the best in the world.
Including this project, business deals involving over 2 billion yuan (US$306 million) of investment were signed on Wednesday. The projects, covering also semiconductor equipment, materials for integrated circuits and artificial intelligence, are expected to yield output of over 10 billion yuan, according to the district government.
The new zone in Jiading, about a square kilometer in size, is the last of the six export processing zones in Shanghai that was upgraded.
Jiading has an export-driven economy, with exports and imports totaling 136.1 billion yuan last year. It’s also distinctive among all Shanghai districts in its developed manufacturing sector.
While the automobile industry, its strongest sector, takes up 70 percent of its manufacturing, this district has also seen fast development in the sectors of intelligent sensors and the Internet of Things, high-performance medical appliances and precision medicine, as well as e-commerce.
Last year, the 10 special supervision areas of the Customs in Shanghai, including the five comprehensive bonded zone, had business revenues of about 2.5 trillion yuan with over 400,000 jobs created, according to Shanghai Customs.
This year, the 10 areas, with 0.6 percent of the entire land area of the city in size, generated about 40 percent of the city’s export and import, the Customs said.
