A Ho Chi Minh City leader has pledged to create more favourable conditions for investors to develop their businesses in the city.

Speaking at a seminar on solutions to improve HCM City ’s investment environment held in the city on April 26, Vice Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee Nguyen Trung Tin highly valued domestic and foreign investors’ contributions to the city’s socio-economic development.

He affirmed the city’s stable investment environment, saying that HCM City is a reliable destination for investors.

At the seminar, 250 representatives from municipal departments and agencies, plus local and foreign-invested business associations, assessed the city’s weaknesses in attracting investment and proposed measures to improve its investment environment in the future.

One of the proposed measures was to deal with cumbersome administrative procedures, inadequate infrastructure, weak human resources, which are barriers to foreign businesses that want to invest in the city.
In the future, HCM City will call for investment in nine groups of services, including finance-credit-insurance; trade; transport, port services and import-export; post-telecommunication and information technology-communication; real estate; consultancy services, science and technology; tourism; health; and education and training.

Between 1988 and 2010, HCM City lured 3,857 foreign invested projects with a combined investment capital of over 29.4 billion USD, accounting for 20 percent of the country’s total FDI.

Since the beginning of this year, about 1.33 billion USD has been invested in the city, 2.5 times higher than the same period last year./.