South China's Guangdong province has 18.07 million registered business entities as of the end of 2023, accounting for one-tenth of the country's total.
Over 1.73 million new business entities were registered in the province last year, showing the highest growth rate in five years.
Gong Xianping, an official with the Guangdong Administration for Market Regulation, said Guangdong's development of business entities has reached a new level thanks to the continuous improvement and optimization of the province's business environment in recent years.
Guangdong, a global production base, now has the country's largest number of business entities, Gong explained at a news conference in Guangzhou on January 2.
The provincial government has spared no effort to promote the construction of a unified large market in the province, a global production base, to create a fair and competitive market environment for companies from home and abroad to expand.
"Government departments have vigorously promoted soft connectivity among the markets in Guangdong and the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions (SARs) in recent years," Gong said.
Meanwhile, the provincial government has made efforts to accelerate the connection of rules and mechanisms in the field of market supervision in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and deepen the reform of the registration confirmation systems in recent years, he said.
Gong said more than 8,000 Hong Kong and Macao-funded legal entities were registered in Guangdong last year, a significant increase of 64.4 percent year-on-year.
The new registered legal entities from the two SARs have helped bring the province's total number of Hong Kong and Macao-funded legal entities to more than 96,000 by the end of 2023, up year-on-year by 15.5 percent.
And Guangdong's foreign-funded enterprises continue to rank first in the country, added Gong.
As of the end of 2023, Guangdong registered more than 199,000 foreign-funded enterprises, accounting for a quarter of China's total, with a year-on-year increase of 5.1 percent.
Last year, 21,000 new foreign-funded companies were registered, a year-on-year increase of 40.8 percent, Gong added.