Huangshan city – located in East China's Anhui province – recently declared Nov 1 to be Huangshan City Business Environment Day, as part of its efforts to enhance its image as a business-friendly city for entrepreneurs.
The city has put a lot of effort in recent years into improving its business environment and it's paid dividends.
For instance, to address the financing challenges facing small and micro-sized enterprises, it allocated a substantial fund of 10 million yuan ($1.37 million) this year and encouraged various banking institutions to provide increased financing options.
By the end of September, the city had witnessed a surge in loans to small and micro-sized enterprises during the current year, with a total of 10.36 billion yuan in new loans advanced and 10.27 billion yuan in loan renewals.
Moreover, Huangshan city is said to be committed to streamlining its government services by introducing an innovative smart approvals system. This system allows businesses to make self-declarations and undergo automatic approvals, resulting in a completely online registration process.
What used to take three days can now be completed in just half a day. To date, 2,142 businesses have enjoyed the benefits of instant approvals.
In addition, on the construction side, Huangshan city has fine-tuned its project approval processes – optimizing 11 categories of project flowcharts and streamlining the steps for approving simple, low-risk projects from 10 to seven.
Thanks to these incentives and improved services, the city attracted 385 new investment projects from January to September this year, raising an impressive 47.39 billion yuan in agreed-upon investments, with 146 of them each exceeding the 100-million-yuan mark.