Qingdao Enterprises Overseas Investment Goes Steadily in the Financial Crisis 2010-02-08  (News from Qingdao Daily) Last year, Qingdao approved 80 overseas investment projects, an increase of 23%, with a total investment of 264 million USD, including 223 million Chinese investment, and a year-on-year increase of 17.6% and 11.2% respectively. There are 8 projects of over 10 million USD, a year-on-year increase about 60%. Under the unfavorable circumstance of foreign trade drop because of the financial crisis, the overseas investment of Qingdao enterprises maintains increment, and the quality and benefit of "going international" continue to increase. Expansion of Overseas Investment Fields Compared with the previous years, the fields of overseas investment of Qingdao enterprises are expanded. Historical breakthroughs are realized especially in fields like development of overseas energy resources and agricultural cooperation, and acquisition of overseas sales networks. Qingdao Luyang International Trading and Shipping Co., Ltd. has expanded its business from a single iron ore trade to iron ore mining and processing. It invested 1.7 million USD and bought equity in an Indonesian mine to carry out joint iron ore mining. This is the first overseas mining case of Qingdao. Haier Group purchased stock of the New Zealand producer of high-end home appliances Fisher & Paykel, becoming the new holding shareholder of the company. Haier takes two of the nine seats of the board of directors of the company. In aspect of agricultural cooperation, there is China's largest agricultural investment project: the project of cotton planting and processing in Africa invested in by Qingdao Ruichang Cotton Industrial Co., Ltd. Three other partners will become an industrial base for cotton with an annual sales revenue of over 50 million USD, which could drive the spinning technology and equipment export and avoid a trade barrier against cotton products made in China. Furthermore, Zhongdi Group, MESNAC, etc. have set up R&D centers in Japan and Slovakia to utilize the abundant technical human resources in other countries to upgrade the R&D capacity of the enterprises and drive up the level and standard of the overseas investment of Qingdao. For many years, trading projects are the main form of overseas investment of Qingdao enterprises. But since last year, the investment formation is diversified from trading projects to production and R&D projects. In accordance with the statistics from Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Commerce the overseas investment projects in the city mainly cover production, R&D, resources development, trade, logistics, and investment, etc. Among them, 53 projects are of the trading type (including representative office), accounting for 66.25% of the total, 27 are productive projects (including resources development and R&D projects), accounting for 33.7% of the total, 6% higher than 2008. This indicates that the foreign investment structure of the city continues to optimize and the quality of investment projects continues to grow. The increase of overseas acquisition is a highlight of the "going international" of Qingdao enterprises in last year. Last year, Qingdao has had 9 overseas acquisition projects, accounting for 11.25% of the total, increasing by nearly 8% when compared to 2008. Among them, Qingdao Kingking Group invested in nearly 60 million USD to acquire 2 oil fields in the USA, Hiking Group purchased 100% shares of the American wig dealer OR Corporation in last year.   The dynamic overseas investment also has a clear pulling effect to the export.  Accompanying the increase of overseas productive projects of the city, the export of equipments made in China, raw materials, and components continue to increase, quickly turning the situation of export drop compared with 2008. Last year, the overseas investment drove about 970 million USD of technology, equipments, raw materials and components export, a year-on-year increase of about 41.3%. The overseas investment of Qingdao enterprises expanded to more countries. The 5 countries of Belgium, Mali, Namibia, Cuba, and Seychelles were included in the list of destinations of Qingdao's overseas investment, which is comprised of 60 countries in total. Among the 80 overseas investment projects, 40 projects are in Asia, accounting for 50% of the city's total; 20 projects ? 25% of the total ? are in America, 10 projects are in Europe, meaning 12.5% of the total, 8 projects are in Africa, 10% of the total, and 2 projects are in Australia, accounting for 2.5% of the total.