Southwest China's Chongqing municipality recently launched a series of policies to support companies recovering from the novel coronavirus pandemic's impact and maintain stability in foreign trade and foreign investment.

The municipality also screened its foreign-owned enterprises' financing demands and paired them with banks to provide targeted services based on local conditions.

A coordination meeting for banks and foreign-owned enterprises was held on Jan 13, where representatives from 10 financial institutions met with 30 foreign-owned companies. The representatives learned that the enterprises mostly need capital to invest in equipment and workshop upgrades, production scale expansion, market expansion and daily operations.

The financial institutions offered targeted solutions for the enterprises to ensure capital flow during the pandemic.

From 2016 to 2020, Chongqing had $52 billion of actually utilized foreign capital and 296 Fortune Global 500 companies. It also had more than 6,000 foreign-invested market entities that contributed more than half of the city's total import and export value, one-tenth of the city's taxes and employed one-tenth of the population.

It was estimated that in 2020 Chongqing would add 270 foreign-invested enterprises, $5 billion of contractual foreign capital and $10 billion of actually utilized foreign capital. It was also predicted that the city would rank among the top in mid-west China for foreign direct investment.