Jiangsu becomes China's first province with 10 mln individual businesses

NANJING, March 30 (Xinhua) -- East China's Jiangsu Province approved the license of its 10 millionth individual business on Thursday, becoming the first province in the country with this scale of registered individual businesses.

The license was granted to Zhang Kang, who plans to open a new bakery on April 10 in Yuhuatai District in the provincial capital Nanjing.

Accounting for about 70 percent of Jiangsu's market entities, individual businesses form a pillar of the province's economy, said Xue Qiang, deputy director of the provincial market regulation bureau.

Statistics show that about 90 percent of individual businesses in Jiangsu are engaged in the tertiary industry, especially those closely related to ordinary people's daily life. Over 16.83 million people are employed in the province's individual businesses.

The market confidence and expectation in such individual businesses have undergone a steady recovery in Jiangsu since the beginning of this year, thanks to a series of preferential policies and measures launched across the country.

As of Tuesday, the number of individual businesses registered in Jiangsu this year has reached 275,000, accounting for 65.4 percent of the province's newly registered market entities during the period, up 5.5 percent compared to the same period of the previous year, according to the bureau.

As an economic heavyweight in the Yangtze River Delta region, Jiangsu is known for its vibrant private sector.

The province achieved the impressive feat of its total number of registered individual businesses reaching 10 million at present from approximately 3.48 million at the end of 2012 in just about 10 years.