BEIJING, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) -- Heads of both Siemens AG from Germany and the U.S.-based Motorola's Tianjin operation have had their confidence strengthened about the companies' future development in China, after the nation's annual central economic conference concluded Monday in Beijing.
Ruey-Bin Kao, chairman of Motorola (China) Electronics Ltd. based in Tianjin, a leading manufacturing base in northern China, told Xinhua Wednesday that the ongoing global economic downturn would not negatively affect his company's business in China. Twenty-two years of experience in the country ensures the company's confidence in the Chinese market.
"In the worldwide recession, China has been an anchor for the global economy by carrying out policy measures quickly and by making massive investments in sustainable infrastructure," said Peter Loscher, president and CEO of Siemens AG.
It would continue to be tough for the global economy in 2010, but China would be one of the economic engines worldwide, he said in Beijing Wednesday.
To prove his confidence, Siemens Ltd., China signed a series of new orders and cooperation agreements, which worth approximately 2billion yuan (293.3 million U.S. dollars) in total, with Chinese partners over the past few days. Most of the orders and accords cover products from Siemens' environmental portfolio.
According to policy makers who attended the central economic conference, which set the tune for China's economic and social development next year, pointed out that to speed up transformation of the nation's economic growth mode would be a priority for the coming year.
They said it was imperial to integrate the promotion of independent innovation with cultivation of strategic, emerging industries.
Loscher predicted that by 2013, China would become an enormous market for green technologies, which would be valued at 1 trillion U.S. dollars.
His colleague, Richard Hausmann, president and CEO of Siemens Ltd., China, said demand from big Chinese cities was especially strong for technologies for sustainable development and for emissions-reduction solutions.
At the beginning of this year, Siemens China vowed to add 1.35 billion yuan to its investment in environmental protection business in China. On Monday, it announced that it would inject more than 500 million yuan into its two operations in Tianjin. Most of the money will go to expansion of generating capacities of wind power equipment to meet rapidly growing demand for such clean and recoverable energy in the Chinese market.
Hausmann estimated that Siemens China's sales in the Chinese mainland would grow 7 percent or so this year upon last year, which would be a good achievement against the global economic slump.
According to the Ministry of Commerce, China actually used 7.899 billion U.S. dollars in foreign capital over the first three quarters of this year, a growth of 18.93 percent on the same period of last year.
Siemens is not unique among foreign investors in China in terms of confidence about the nation's future development.
Bernd Blumenberg, president of BASF-YPC Co., Ltd.(BYC), a 50-50 joint venture between BASF from Germany and China's leading oil refiner, Sinopec, noted that the company's performance in China was better than expected, and the joint venture would invest more.
BYC has already started construction work on a second-phase project, which will cost 10.4 billion yuan and begin to produce downstream and specialty chemicals in 2011.
Blumenberg said to start the second-phase project despite the ongoing global economic downturn, was because that the company was confident about investment climate in China and the nation's future development.
The Inter IKEA Center Group (IICG), which is headquartered in Copenhagen of Danmark, has recently decided to enter the Chinese market and sited two "super regional shopping centers" in Beijing, China's capital, and Wuxi, a city in eastern China's Jiangsu province.
The reason why the company chose China as the first foothold to explore its overseas markets was that it expected the nation would become more economically powerful and consumption there would be stronger, said John Leif Tegner, president of IICG.
The U.S.-based carbon black supplier, Cabot, recently expanded the total annual production capacity of its Tianjin operations to 300,000 tonnes and made the city the world's largest manufacturing base for the raw material of tyre.
The company's CEO and president, Patrick Prevost, said the economic growth in China was driving up production and consumption of motor vehicles and accordingly, demand for tyre was expanding in the nation. He predicted that China would need 2 million tones of carbon black every year, and the demand would increase at an average annual rate of 12 percent to 15 percent.
At the beginning of December, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, predicted that in 2010 the world economy would rebound more or less with developing nations as the leading forces and that China would expect an economic growth of 8.8 percent for the whole of next year.
