Southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have rolled out a plan to build the China-ASEAN Digital Trade Center to boost regional digital economic cooperation.
Headquartered in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi and the permanent venue of the China-ASEAN Expo, the center is designated as a digital economy development park with office buildings, digital creative industries, platform operations, big data and the internet of things, among other facilities.
The project is also important for the construction of the China-ASEAN information harbor.
The Guangxi government said the center will be built in two phases. By the end of 2021, 5 billion yuan (US$724 million) will be invested in the center, allowing it to accommodate 4,000 enterprises, with more than five overseas warehouses and exhibition centers in ASEAN countries.
Between 2022 and 2025, another 20 billion yuan will be invested, allowing the center to nurture more than 10,000 digital-trade market entities, 10 of which will each have a turnover of more than 1 billion yuan, while another 100 will have a turnover of more than 100 million yuan each.
Liquefied natural gas price
China’s comprehensive import price index for liquefied natural gas (LNG) declined last week, according to the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange (SHPGX).
The LNG index, not including tax and processing fees, came in at 1,888 yuan per tonne in the week ended August 16, down 4.3% from the previous week.
The index, jointly developed by a monitoring center under the General Administration of Customs and the SHPGX, was launched on October 16, 2019, and is due on a weekly basis to offer a new pricing references for importers.
Outbound direct investment
China’s non-financial outbound direct investment (ODI) went down 2.1% year on year in the first seven months of 2020, official data showed Thursday. The ODI amounted to 423.65 billion yuan in the period, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
Investment into countries along the Belt and Road surged 28.9% year on year, accounting for 17% of the total ODI during the period, up 4.5 percentage points from the same period last year.
The outbound investment mainly flowed to sectors including leasing and business services, manufacturing as well as wholesale and retail industries, the data showed.
Major overseas engineering projects increased. The contract value of newly signed overseas projects came in at $121.75 billion during the January-July period, up 4.3% year on year.
Company news
Huawei Technologies and China Telecom Shenzhen jointly launched the world’s first pilot site that binds 5G Super Uplink and downlink carrier aggregation (CA). This pilot project leverages Super Uplink to maximize the uplink coverage and experience, as well as fully utilizes downlink dual-carrier CA to deliver the optimal user experience.
China Telecom and Huawei said this was a breakthrough following their joint commercial adoption of Super Uplink. The success of this pilot shows that the advantages of China Telecom and China Unicom sharing 5G networks, once seen only in technical solutions, are already available on commercial networks.
It also marks a major milestone in the construction of 5G best-experience networks and a great achievement for China Telecom Shenzhen’s 5G City initiative.
The stories were written by Xu Jiangshan and Liu Licong and first published at ATimesCN.com. They were translated by Nadeem Xu.