A few days ago, State Administration of Foreign Exchange held videophone conference about implementation of policies related with foreign exchange collection and settlement through national trade channels, which aimed to summarize the policy implementation thoroughly and dispose the work in the next step. Deng Xianhong, deputy director general of SAFE, attended the conference and gave the speech. The relevant personnel in each branch office of SAFE also participated in this conference.

In recent years, the foreign exchange capitals keeping entering in a large scale increased the pressure on disequilibrium of balance of payment and appreciation of RMB. In order to attack abnormal capitals entering strictly and prevent potential financial risks, administrative departments of foreign exchange adapted to the direction and requirements of foreign exchange administration reform, implemented the conception of equilibrium management, created the mode of category supervision and control, and strengthened the management of collection and settlement of trade foreign exchange. For export collection of enterprises, non-spot supervision, analysis and checkout are carried out. For main body of trade exchange settlement, category management is adopted. For “focus enterprise” of exchange settlement, special supervision and control are implemented. For most normally operating enterprises, convenience is provided. Since policies implementing in November of 2006, the first batch of focus enterprises were checked and established in the nationwide, the number of which was 5303 accounting for 3.04% of the total number of all the enterprises. After that, according to the requirements such as “institutionalization and standardization” and “integrating principle and flexibility” of establishing focus enterprises, all the local administrative departments of foreign exchange based on actual conditions of the local foreign exchange revenue and spending and development of commerce and perfected the checkout and management of the list of focus enterprises continuously. By April of 2007, another 472 “focus enterprises” were established successively. In July of 2007, SAFE has solved the problems of complicated hand-over procedures of “focus enterprise list” and inconvenient bank inquire among the branches administrative departments by establishing “post and management system of settlement focus enterprise list”, which increased the efficiency further.

The management policies of collection and settlement of trade foreign exchange enhance the validity of trade foreign exchange authenticity management, establish and perfect the supervision and control mechanism of preventing short-term capitals without trade background from entering the domestic market to settle foreign exchange and gain profits in the name of export foreign exchange collection, and restrict the illegal and cross-border flows of foreign exchange capitals by trade channels. Between November of 2006 and April of 2007, the year-on-year growth of the national prepayments decreased by 44 percentage points compared with that of the 10 months. By the end of April, 2007, the total amount of foreign exchange collection of national “focus enterprises” decreased by 40% compared that by the end of September, 2006. Meanwhile, the implementation of policy strengthened the consciousness of legal operation and honest management and guided trade foreign exchange capitals to flow legally.

It is pointed on the conference that around the central target of promoting balance of international payments, SAFE will change administrative mode further, strengthen the reform, accelerate the reform process of import and export exchange checking system, construct trade foreign exchange checking system and dynamic supervision mechanism of trade foreign exchange payments actively and establish enterprise long-term examination mechanism and integrated, scientific and high-effective trade foreign exchange category management system in order to prevent foreign capitals from entering illegally by trade channels and strengthen supervision to cross-border capital flows.