BASF project benefits from China’s opening up’

THE highly anticipated BASF Zhanjiang Verbund site was put into operation in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, on Tuesday. At the inauguration ceremony, Martin Brudermüller, chairman of the board of executive directors of BASF, said the project wouldn’t have been commenced without China’s reform and opening up.

Video from Xinhuanet.com

BASF’s largest investment to date, the project covers 9 square kilometers and is expected to receive a total investment of up to 10 billion euros (US$9.93 billion) by 2030.

“We benefit from China’s policies of widening market access. Without the reform, we wouldn’t have commenced the wholly owned Zhanjiang Verbund site project,” Brudermüller said at an interview with Xinhua.

As the first wholly foreign-funded project in China’s heavy chemical industry, the Zhanjiang Verbund site represents a new paradigm for China’s wider opening up and win-win cooperation between China and Germany.

An aerial photo taken July 28 shows a view of BASF Zhanjiang Verbund site in Zhanjiang, South China's Guangdong Province. Xinhua

China has vowed to open its doors even wider amid rising trade protectionism in other countries. Policies have been promulgated to ease market access, strengthen intellectual property protection and expand imports.

In the long term, China’s drivers of economic growth remain convincing. These include continued urbanization, new technologies and an emphasis on more sustainable paths for long-term growth. BASF is well-positioned to benefit from these trends, according to Brudermüller.

Brudermüller said that BASF’s strategic move of investing in a new integrated base in China was aimed at seizing the opportunity of the booming market, getting closer to customers, expanding market share and bringing about rapid development.

To support the project, Guangdong has established a coordinated mechanism at provincial and municipal government levels and gained support from the Ministry of Commerce to list it into a national key foreign funded project.

A steel pipe pile is driven into the seabed at a dock of BASF Zhanjiang Verbund site in Zhanjiang on Jan. 13.

The provincial government followed the progress, coordinated the issues in land use, taxation reduction and exemption for import facilities, quotas for naphtha and awarding policies, according to the Guangdong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology.

The provincial government, following its polices on attracting and utilizing foreign investments, offered 67.33 million yuan in reward as the accumulative use of foreign investments on the Zhanjiang project had reached US$788 million since it was initiated in August 2019, data showed.

Guangdong is a center for important industries such as transportation, consumer goods and electronics.

The Guangzhou and Shenzhen airports, two major airports of the GBA airport clusters, handled 120 million passenger trips a year.

The scale of its seven industries, namely new generation electronic information, green petrochemicals, intelligent household appliances, advanced materials, modern light industry textile, software and information service, as well as modern agriculture, has reached the benchmark of 1 trillion yuan.

Shenzhen has promulgated a regulation for protecting the rights of foreign investments, the first local regulation on protecting foreign investments in China.

It addresses issues like IPR protection, technological cooperation, standard accreditation and government procurement that foreign investments care most about.

Editor/Shao Jingfeng

WeChat Editor/Claudia