(Yicai) Feb. 19 -- Shanghai has released its latest action plan to enhance the city's business environment, unveiling 150 measures encompassing market access, employment, international trade, and other areas.

The new measures aim to further help trade and investment, boost administrative efficiency, and improve government services, according to the blueprint issued yesterday.

Regarding international trade, Shanghai plans to upgrade client services on mobile end and develop a cross-border data exchange system. The city will also carry out special rectification in the government procurement domain to promote market competition. 

In regulatory enforcement actions, Shanghai proposes to improve credit evaluation and hierarchical classification supervision, support the work done by the research and development centers of food businesses to achieve integrated production, and foster a new industry model where production is done in high-rise buildings, according to the plan.

Since 2017, Shanghai has benchmarked the World Bank's evaluation index system, including the new Business Ready environment assessment system, and has brought out 951 measures.

Because the pilot program in the city’s Pudong New Area exempts imported goods from customs clearance procedures, Porsche China has had 24,000 parts benefiting from this policy, said Liu Jianlong, vice president of the carmaker's legal compliance and public policy department.

After the introduction of the Marketing Authorization Holder system, Hutchmed's cancer drug Fuquintinib became the first pilot product in Shanghai, enabling it to enter the market at least three years ahead of schedule, noted the biopharmaceutical firm's Senior Vice President Cui Yiling.

Hong Kong-based Hutchmed has launched three product types of Nintedanib, an idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis treatment, with 15 pipeline projects entering the registration phase for clinical trials.

There were 3.42 million operating entities in Shanghai as of the end of last year, including 2.9 million companies, according to official data. The number of newly registered operating entities surged 29 percent to 535,500 in 2023 from the previous year.

Editor: Martin Kadiev