China's Cabinet seeks more mergers, reorganizations among nation's businesses

China's central government has urged more efforts be made to promote mergers and reorganizations of the country's enterprises, a government statement said Thursday.

Being fragmented, some Chinese industries suffered from a relatively weak ability to be innovative and competitive, said the State Council, or the Cabinet, in the statement released after an executive meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao on Wednesday.

The Cabinet urged efforts be made to enact mergers and reorganizations of businesses, deepen reforms, upgrade the industrial structure, and quicken transformation of economic development patterns.

The move should be conducive to increasing the quality and quantity of development, strengthening the capabilities to counter risks from the international market and achieving sustainable development.

Also, a wide variety of regulations hindering the merger of enterprises and the reorganization and obstructing fair competition should be eliminated, along with regulations created by local governments seeking to keep enterprises of other localities from acquiring and reorganizing their own firms, said the statement.

Further, private firms should be given access to participate in industries that laws and regulations do not forbid, reforms on industry monopolies should be accelerated, it said.

Through mergers and reorganization, private businesses should be encouraged to enter some competitive business fields of industries that currently hold monopolies, said the statement.

Mergers and reorganization should be used to eliminate backward production facilities, while the central government would set up a special fund to support mergers and reorganizations, the State Council said.

Additionally, risk control and information disclosure should be stepped up to prevent and fight insider trading and manipulating of markets and to protect the interests of enterprises and prevent state assets from being drained away, said the statement.

The State Council also called for strengthened supervision over central state-owned enterprises (central SOEs) from the board of supervisors to move forward on reforms on central SOEs and make sure the value of state assets are maintained and added.

The draft of Regulations on Natural Disaster Relief was also approved in the executive meeting, said the statement.

Source:Xinhua