2nd LD-Writethru-China Focus: China reforms business system to stimulate market

China will continue to reform its business system to ease government regulations for companies and inject vitality into the market, Zhang Mao, minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), said on Monday.

"Chinese authorities will continue to streamline administration, delegate more powers to lower levels so as to give the market and society more play in economic development, and ease regulations for businesses," Zhang said at a press conference on the sidelines of the national legislature annual session.

China this year will further simplify the process for entrepreneurs to register or nullify their businesses, give companies more decision-making power to choose their business scopes, he said.

"China will also press ahead with the reform of integrating the business license, the certificate of organization code and the certificate of taxation registration into one certificate to ease the registration procedure for companies," Zhang said.

China needs to develop "twin engines" to drive development, popular entrepreneurship and mass innovation, paired with increased supplies of public goods and services, Premier Li Keqiang said in the government work report at the National People's Congress annual session.

Although China's broader economy is slowing, entrepreneurs are driving a wave of startups that become a bright spot for the economic landscape and an important engine for future growth. China's economic growth slowed pace to 7.4 percent in 2014, its weakest annual expansion since 1990.

Amid the government reforms to cut red tape and simplify approval procedures, about 10,500 new enterprises are registered every day, a spike from the number of nearly 7,000 before the business system reform kicked off in March 2014, Zhang said, adding that 94 percent of the newly registered enterprises are individual businesses or private firms.

SAIC statistics showed that individual businesses and private firms have created more than 250 million job opportunities.

Moreover, the newly registered foreign-funded companies snapped the declining trend for two consecutive years to post a solid increase in 2014, and about 78 percent of the newly registered companies last year were in the tertiary sector, evidence of the improvements of economic restructuring, he said.

Zhang also stressed efforts would be laid this year on establishing a credit system for companies, setting up a system to blacklist market rules offenders and enhancing information sharing between market watchdogs, to create a fair environment friendly to competition. Endi