China pivotal to MNCs' global biz strategy

People walk past the booth of French industrial conglomerate Schneider Electric during the seventh CIIE in Shanghai on Nov 9. Driven by its institutional opening-up, market size, robust infrastructure, growing innovation strength and talent pool, as well as its status as a "world factory", China's foreign direct investment, in actual use, reached $163.3 billion in 2023, an increase of 176 times compared to $920 million in 1983, data from the Ministry of Commerce showed. Foreign executives at the CIIE often express "long-term confidence in China", grounded in the country's stable economic fundamentals and the consistent trajectory of steady growth in the world's second-largest economy, said Liu Tao, a researcher specializing in market economy studies at the State Council's Development Research Center. Reflecting this enthusiasm, Treasury Wine Estates, Australia's largest winemaker by sales revenue and the parent company of Australian wine brand Penfolds, believes that the CIIE is a well-developed business platform for China to open up global cooperation and promote a shared prosperous market. To meet surging domestic demand for various agricultural products, the Basel, Switzerland-headquartered Syngenta Group signed import agreements with a number of companies such as Louis Dreyfus Company, the Netherlands-based processor and merchant of agricultural goods, and Jiusan Grain and Oil Industry Group Co Ltd in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, for a total contract value of $1.5 billion during the seventh CIIE.