The Signing Ceremony for Projects with Foreign Investment event was held in Shanghai on Jan 10.

Some 60 foreign investment projects were signed during the event, achieving an aggregated investment of $7.3 billion. Pudong harvested a number of high-end foreign investment projects.

In the World Bank's Doing Business report that was released in October, China's business environment was ranked 31st among 190 economies, up by 15 spots from 2018. It was the seventh consecutive year that China’s ranking improved.

Shanghai and Beijing were the two Chinese cities selected for the evaluation of China's business environment. The latter, which has in recent years introduced a slew of pilot projects and measures to facilitate business proceedings, accounted for 55 percent of the evaluation.

In 2019, Shanghai attracted 6,800 new foreign-funded projects, an increase of 21.5 percent year-on -year.

In addition, contractual foreign investment reached $50.25 billion, up 7.1 percent year-on-year, while foreign investment reached $19.05 billion, up 10.1 percent year-on-year. 

The regional headquarters of 720 foreign-funded multinational companies, as well as 461 foreign-funded R&D centers, had landed in Shanghai by the end of 2019, as the city's headquarters economy took off.

For example, Festo is a German multinational industrial control and automation company and a global leader in automation technology and technical training that has produced various types of bionic robots for biological research and development.

The company started its business operation in China in 1985 and in 2015, upgraded its original headquarters to headquarters of Greater China.

Foundations of the Festo Asia Pacific logistics center and the custom production center, both in Shanghai, were laid in May 2019, and the 42,000-square-meter plant is expected to be completed by the end of 2020.