Intellectual property protection and financial incentives among measures to spur local firms

Faced with the economic and social challenges brought by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Xi’an Hi-tech Industries Development Zone has issued 15 measures to optimize the business environment and achieve high-quality development this year, said local officials.

Those measures not only focus on the construction of projects related to land use, supervision and administrative approval, but also set goals in terms of protecting intellectual property rights and improving the business environment.

The zone’s measure on project protection guarantees the land use requirements of projects and limits the total time for project acceptance to within five working days.

The high-tech zone will also reduce the pre-check of completion and acceptance data from 17 items to 13 items. The time for the review of regulatory data will be reduced from seven working days to three working days, and the time limit for acceptance will be within five working days.

In addition to these measures, the high-tech zone will also speed up the approval of energy use by 30 percent. In terms of water use, it will be completed within three working days; for electricity, the low-voltage project will be completed within seven working days; as for gas consumption, the installation time is shortened to seven to 32 working days.

Over the past few years, the zone has aimed to protect intellectual property rights and promoted related industries.

The zone will establish an intellectual property service system and introduce incentive policies for intellectual property institutions.

“We should build a coordinated operation mechanism, improve online and offline IPR protection assistance, and form a relatively complete intellectual property rights protection system,” a staff member in the zone said.

Under the mechanism, the zone will provide enterprises with specific services and guidance. This includes: intellectual property legal consultation; rights protection assistance consultation, involving patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets; and provide detailed legal operation advice.

At the same time, it will also build a legal protection system under the Belt and Road Initiative by setting up a Silk Road Arbitration Center. It will resolve commercial disputes involving countries involved in the BRI by arbitration.

In order to stimulate enterprises, China issued a series of tax reduction and fee-reduction policies, which is a symptomatic solution to the “fund hunger” of enterprises.

In 2020, the high-tech zone will implement the national tax reduction and fee reduction policy and the universal fee reduction policy of China and Shaanxi province. All administrative fees at the district level are free of charge.

“Free administrative fees” in the zone not only creates a superior entrepreneurial environment, optimizes the development environment and high-quality service environment, but also spurs “small capital” into“big capital”, according to the zone.