Hohhot, Inner Mongolia [Photo/Hohhot Daily]

Hohhot, city of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, reportedly engineered a major enhancement of its business conditions last year – with an assessment index for the city posting a 10 percent improvement on the previous year – according to an evaluation released by the National Development and Reform Commission.

In 2019, the city's business environment evaluation languished among the bottom of cities and other places in the autonomous region.

However, in the wake of a series of remedial policies – including the Decision on Further Optimizing the Business Environment – Hohhot staged a dramatic turnaround. It jumped to second place in the evaluation ranking of the autonomous region in 2020, while it was also one of the cities with the fastest improvement in business convenience in China that year.

In order to further improve efficiency, Hohhot has launched one-stop services for enterprises and the time it takes for a business to officially be established was reduced from 3.75 working days in 2019 to half a day currently.

Since the start of the year, 19 projects with a total investment of 21.1 billion yuan ($3.26 billion) were started two months in advance of their schedule through the new system, saving 80 million yuan in costs.

In addition, Hohhot has also undertaken measures, such as helping to remove the credit constraints of enterprises, paving the way for them to get funding more easily.

Hohhot has also provided incentives to newly established or newly signed banks, insurance companies, securities firms, funds and other financial institutions. Since 2019, various funding worth 17.72 million yuan has been extended to businesses.

In 2020, the city issued a policy called Fifteen Measures to Support the Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Response to the Epidemic. This move, to counteract the negative impact of the novel coronavirus, saw the provision of 1.6 billion yuan in concessional loans to key enterprises engaged in epidemic prevention and control. In addition, interest rates and guarantee rates for small business loans dropped by an estimated 10 percent.