A night view of the Bund in Shanghai, 2019. [Photo/Xinhua]

Shanghai released a new scheme to improve its business environment, showing its efforts made in early January to deepen construction of a first-class international business environment in 2020.

According to the report Doing Business 2020 released by the World Bank the index of China's cross-border trade rose from 65th place in 2019 to 56th place in 2020, with Shanghai ranking fifth among the world's maritime economies in terms of cross-border trade facilitation.

As the world's fifth largest financial hub, Shanghai boasts the best business environment in China. Tesla's investment in Shanghai is testament to that. The Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory, the largest foreign-invested manufacturing project in Shanghai, delivered its first China-made cars in December 2019. This achievement showed the "super speed" at which the project got off the ground -- the laying of the corner stone, production preparation and commercialization were all completed within one year. 

The China (Shanghai) International Trade Single Window

The China (Shanghai) International Trade Single Window is one of the most important scoring points in the "cross-border trade" evaluation for the World Bank's report.

To date, the China (Shanghai) International Trade Single Window has formed ten functional blocks with characteristic supervision and service, and a group of 53 local applications. In addition, 22 departments have entered the single window mode, serving more than 40,000 enterprises in Shanghai and nearly 300,000 import and export enterprises in China.

Shen Weihua, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, said that the single window not only solves the declaration of goods and means of transport and the handling of the license required by enterprises for customs declaration at ports, but also realizes many local characteristic service functions.

In 2020, the single window will evolve into business service architecture that integrates "standard functions, featured services and an application market".

Reduction of port fees and "one basket fees"

As early as March, 2019 several municipal departments including the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce and Shanghai Customs jointly rolled out a raft of measures to reduce the "one basket" of port fees: notably there was a 15 percent reduction in freight charges and a 20 percent reduction in security charges. Shanghai also further reduced the removal fees by 10 percent, which saved 300 million yuan ($435,236) in the city's enterprises import and export logistics costs.

Bonded maintenance for exported products

Red tape for exported laser products being returned to China for maintenance was recently cut in Jiading, thanks to the joint efforts of Jiading district's export processing zone and customs.

Hesai Technology, a global leader in 3D sensors, was the first company in Shanghai, and China, to benefit from the more convenient system.

A total of 15 repaired range finders were recently sent back to the United States via the Jiading Export Processing Zone, shortening the district's customs clearance time and setting a new model in institutional innovation and facilitation of foreign trade.

"It's much faster than I expected," said Hesai director Zheng Cheng.