According to Nanning Mayor Lin Guoqiang, the investment and trade fair is part of the city's strategy to secure both domestic and foreign investments and the city is gearing up its efforts to attract many more investors in the coming years.

Lin said the city is particularly interested in massive investment projects and is encouraging the world's top 500 companies, as well as the nation's top 500 companies to invest in Nanning.

He said that Nanning is beefing up efforts to improve the infrastructure of its economic and technological development zone, its new and high-tech industrial development zone, as well as other industrial parks in the city.

And the city will improve services for investors.

He said that Nanning enjoys unique geographical advantages that will hopefully lure ASEAN investors as well as those from Hong Kong, Macao and the economic boomtowns of the Pearl River Delta in the neighbouring province of Guangdong.

The mayor said that Nanning has seen the fastest growth of capital input in the past five years with contractual domestic investment reaching 34.37 billion yuan (US$4.24 billion) in 2005, which represents annual growth of 56.5 per cent from the 5.73 billion yuan (US$706.54 million) in 2001.

And the contractual foreign investment the city secured in 2005 was worth US$359 million, an annual rise of 22.33 per cent from US$160.31 million in 2001.

Total contractual domestic investment the city secured totalled 84.86 billion yuan (US$10.46 billion) from 2001 to 2005; and foreign investments of US$1.23 billion.

Citing the statistics, he said, the city actually used domestic capital input of 38.64 billion yuan (US$4.76 billion) in the five years; and foreign capital input of US$443.84 million.

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