On August 16, the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics reported that foreign direct investment (FDI) per project in the city's suburbs grew by an average of 19 percent in the first half of this year, although the number of new foreign-invested projects fell as did the total amount invested.
The statistics revealed four trends in suburban FDI during the period.

Firstly, average investment per project increased from US$4.05 million to US$4.81 million, while the number of projects declined from 840 to 640 and total contracted investment dropped by 9.5 percent to US$3.077 billion. Secondly, the percentage of capital actually invested jumped from 46 percent to 70 percent of the contracted investment. Thirdly, foreign-invested projects located in industrial parks grew by 87.4 percent year-on-year to 388. Fourthly and finally, nearly half of all the newforeign-invested projects are wholly-owned.