Xiao Zhenyu, the Director of Guangzhou Foreign Trade Bureau advised on Jan.12 that Guangzhou's foreign trade has withstood the severe test of the financial crisis, and actively undergone foreign trade restructuring and transformation, by initiatoing international leading service projects like China-Singapore "Knowledge City", Federal Express, Maersk and TESCO, etc. into Guangzhou.

Guangzhou joined the National 100 Billion USD Import and Export City Club in 2010, but has at the same time prepared well for times when there may be global financial crises. With this in mind  Guangzhou will focus on advancing the transformation of the modern mode of foreign trade development, promoting synchronous development of the quality and effect of its foreign trade, seeking to transform its reputation from that of simply a big Chinese city to that of a powerful city in the field of foreign trade, enhancing its international competitiveness and markedly lifting its export performance by forming an international brand of "created in Guangzhou", "made in Guangzhou" and "served by Guangzhou" preliminarily.

Then Guangzhou will take promotion of close connection between business environment in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao" etc, and taking international developed cities such as Singapore and Seoul, etc. as benchmarks in terms of learning, as how to accelerate its institutional development and operatinging mode in terms of international conventions, opening up further its trading strengths, and its ability to participate in international cooperation and competition.

In addition to optimization and improvement of it's business environment, Guangzhou will also explore a mechanical cooperation platform in term of "seeking out" enterprises which "bring in" the capital.

With this in mind the government will set up the stage to:

• guide and encourage enterprises of mechanical manufacturing, textile, light industry and building materials, etc. with comparative advantages to set up plants in ASEAN, Africa, South America and the Middle East;

• to promote high and new tech enterprises of electronics, software and biology, etc. to establish overseas research and development organizations; and

• to support competitive enterprises to merge and acquire overseas enterprises and well-known brands and invest to build manufacturing bases, economic zones and overseas marketing networks, so as to improve their ability to contract foreign projects and develop labor cooperation.
 
Separate to these strategic objectives, Guangzhou will accelerate its energies to cultivate and form some domestic transnational corporations with self-owned brand and independent intellectual property rights, so as to improve their competitiveness on the international market. Guangzhou is currently striving to attract more than three internationally competitive transnational corporations to make their home base in the city, whose annual sales volumes exceed 1 billion USD and achieve an overseas sales rate of over 50% in 2020.