Tianjin's foreign investment hits $6.3b in 2014

Actual utilized foreign investment in Tianjin reached $6.365 billion in 2014, up 10.5 percent year-on-year, the Municipal Bureau of Statistics in Tianjin said on Friday.

Zhang Qiang, deputy director of the bureau, said: "The degree of economic openness in Tianjin has been increasing."

Moreover, cooperation in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has further deepened, with the amount of investment in Tianjin from Beijing and Hebei reaching 48.743 billion yuan ($7.87 billion) in the first quarter, accounting for 44.9 percent of the actual utilized domestic investment in Tianjin.

He said: "The coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has been pushed forward."

So far, 33 percent of the imported and exported goods from Tianjin ports come from Beijing and Hebei province. The establishment of transportation infrastructure has also developed, including the extension of the inter-city high-speed railway between Beijing and Tianjin as well as Tianjin and Baoding and the Tianjin section of the Beijing-Qinhuangdao Expressway.The inter-city high-speed railway between Beijing and Tianjin carried 6.2 million passengers in 2014, up 7.3 percent year-on-year. Zhang said the statistics show that "we are making progress in undertaking the functions that Beijing is trying to transfer to other cities".

Faced with complex domestic and global economic conditions, the overall health of the Tianjin economy is stable with a strong growth momentum. This year, the Tianjin National Innovation Model Zone was officially recognized and the government is ready to realize the economic transformation supported by innovation and SMEs.

"There were 3,949 new SMEs in Tianjin in this quarter, and the total amount is 64,600," he said.