Wuxi was listed among the 10 Chinese cities with the best business environment on a ranking published by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce in November.
Wuxi, located in the center of the Yangtze River Delta region, is always striving to build a world-class business-friendly environment and constantly working to satisfy the demands of market entities, according to the municipal government.
The city's business environment has significantly improved after years of efforts, especially in terms of building permissions, access to power supply, starting businesses, cross-border trade, and taxation, the government said.
Wuxi released an implementation plan to optimize its business environment last October. A total of 80 measures were put forward to promote further reform.
After implementing these measures, the time required to open a business in the city is expected to be reduced to less than two working days, while approving an engineering construction project is expected to take 80 days.
According to the government, taxes were reduced by 22.9 billion yuan ($3.3 billion) from January to November 2019 to incentivize enterprises to invest more in innovative projects. The city is also supporting 337 technical transformation and intelligent manufacturing projects and 120 science and technology talents projects, and has built 151 academician workstations since last year.
Wuxi has been making efforts to develop small- and medium-sized enterprises since September 2016. Nearly 5,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises in the city have received financial support thanks to the government's 40-billion-yuan credit guarantee fund. Since last November, the credit loan limit increased from 5 million yuan to 10 million yuan for certain enterprises, and over 10,000 firms are expected to benefit from increased financial support.