In Which Provinces are Chinese Companies Concentrated?

As you’d expect for the world’s most populous nation, there are a huge number of Chinese companies. But where in China are they located? Are there certain provinces with high concentrations of companies?

In this article we find out which provinces have the highest and lowest number of companies, and see how this compares against their population figures.

By analyzing the number of companies per 1000 population we have identified the provinces with the highest concentration of Chinese companies.

Counting Chinese Companies

We have previously identified the total number of companies in China but for this article collecting the necessary data for all of the provinces proved to be quite a challenge.

No central database of statistics could be found so we have based our figures mainly on reports emanating from each of the various provincial AIC branches. Data for Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan was more straightforward to identify and has been included.

A data table is provided at the end of this article including a description of the information source for the number of companies in each province.

Concentration of Chinese Companies Per Province

Our calculations identified that the province with the highest concentration of Chinese companies is Hong Kong, with a huge 183 registered companies per 1000 people.

There are many reasons why Hong Kong has a very high number of company registrations, for example because it is rated very highly internationally for ease of doing business.

After that, we expected to see the major 1st Tier China municipalities of Shanghai and Beijing stand our prominently. Although both have a high concentration of companies, the ratios were not as high as we had expected – Zhejiang province actually has a higher number of companies per population than Shanghai!

It is not surprising to see that China’s provinces with the strongest economies all have a high concentration of companies – Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong all rank near the top.

Meanwhile, there are low concentrations of companies in China’s less developed areas inland provinces, most notably in Henan, Hunan, Gansu and Guangxi.

Table of the Concentration of Chinese Companies per Province

This chart identifies the number of companies per 1000 people in each province of China, in order of highest concentration to least.

Concentration of Chinese Companies Mapped

Plotting these results on a map shows that the regions with the highest concentration of Chinese companies are the developed coastal provinces.

The northern provinces of Shandong, Liaoning, Jilin and Inner Mongolia also have fairly high concentrations, at least relative to the less developed inland provinces.

Chinese Companies per Province Data Table

A full table of the data collected for this article is displayed below.

N.b. Population data is taken from China’s 2010 National Census.

Now we we know which provinces have a high concentration of companies, but do you want to know which provinces foreign companies do business in?