Beijing to widen market access for foreign investors

Will allow foreign-owned companies to provide outbound travel services

BEIJING: Beijing will further open its services market to foreign investors in several industries including tourism, internet access services and non-profit nursing institutions for the aged, as well as audio and video products, a senior official said.

Liu Meiying, spokeswoman for Beijing municipal government’s commerce bureau, said the State Council has approved the measures the capital has proposed to further open the city’s services industry to foreign capital in early November.

According to the new measures, Beijing will allow wholly foreign-owned companies to provide outbound travel services to customers.

In 2003, the first wholly foreign-owned travel agency was set up in China. However, there were limitations on its service as it could not offer outbound travel products.

Wang Yue, Deputy Head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, said the new measure will enrich the outbound travel products in the market and bring more competition to their domestic counterparts, which would be beneficial for long-term development of the industry.

“The international tourism business mode and advanced management will become a good incentive to the market and consumption, which will help to meet the growing demand from the public,” she said. Zhang Guodong, a senior official at online travel agency ly.com, has a positive view of the new policy.

“It will not have any huge impact on the industry because China’s tourism industry is growing rapidly and has created a huge market for different niche customers. Online travel businesses have developed even faster, with annual growth rate of 35-40%,” he said. Compared with US and Europe, whose online travel market is growing at 45-50% annually, China still has enormous growth potential, he added.

“The new policy will only bring better experience to the market and the customers. It won’t be a big threat to the domestic travel agencies. Together with foreign-owned travel agencies, we should cooperate and make the market bigger.”

In addition to the tourism industry, Beijing will call off the limits on shares of foreign investment in the internet access service industry.

This article originally appeared on the China Economic Net 

Published in The Express Tribune, December 5^th, 2019.

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