金融英语阅读：Foreign firms shift to less developed regions

　　Unilever, the world's second-largest consumer goods maker, plans to significantly increase its investment in Hefei, a medium-sized city in East China's Anhui Province.

　　"We will invest 700 million yuan ($102.52 million) in our production base in Hefei to boost output value to 10 billion yuan ($1.46 billion) in five years," Zeng Xiwen, vice president of Unilever's Greater China region, said last week.

　　Zeng said the company has relocated seven factories from Shanghai and South China's Guangdong Province to second-tier Hefei, taking into consideration lower production costs and the availability of land use for business expansion.

　　The Unilever Industrial Zone, located in the Economic and Technological Development Zone of Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, has become one of Unilever's four major global production bases. It reported an output value of 1 billion yuan ($146.46 million) in March alone, according to Zeng.

　　The company's former Shanghai factories used to register a production cost higher than other plants in Indonesia, Japan, Australia and Vietnam. But Hefei, with cheap labor and land prices and advantages in its power supply and geography, has helped the base there record the company's lowest average production cost.

　　Hefei had attracted 25 of the world's top 500 companies, such as ABB and HITACHI, by the end of last year. The city saw an influx of $1.3 billion in investment in 2009, up 8.35 percent from 2008, said Lan Tian, director of the Commerce Bureau of Hefei.

　　According to an annual business climate survey released by the American Chamber of Commerce in China early this month, nearly 80 percent of interviewed US companies were planning to increase investment in China this year, with many focusing on second- and third-tier cities.

　　About 28 percent of the 253 respondents said they were likely to set up sales or manufacturing operations in cities they were not already in such as Tianjin, Wuhan and Dalian. Another 11 percent were working on feasibility studies but were unlikely to invest in new cities this year.