On August 29, the Information Office of Liaoning Provincial People’s Government held the first press conference of the series on optimizing the business environment. The conference highlighted the reform and innovation achievements of various departments, with a focus on promoting cost reduction, enhancing efficiency, and fostering a fair and just market environment.

To continuously streamline project approval procedures, Liaoning has prepared the “Liaoning Province Investment Project Approval and Administration List”, which standardizes the processing time limits, application materials and implementation levels for investment project approval items across the province. The list addresses problems such as duplicated reviews, repeated requests for documents, and inconsistent material requirements.

The province is advancing work to enable individual businesses to convert and upgrade into companies, and has launched a provincial pilot in Shenyang for transforming sole proprietorship businesses into companies. Eligible individual industrial and commercial households (sole proprietorship businesses) may upgrade to enterprises (companies) through a way of “direct change of registration”. This process ensures that their original establishment date and unified social credit code remain unchanged, allowing them to retain their original trade names and industry characteristics to the greatest lawful extent. The change effectively protects intangible assets, such as business reputation and brand value accumulated by small and micro operators over many years.

Liaoning is committed to the high-quality development of multimodal transport. From January to July, the province’s sea–rail intermodal transport volume reached 1.28 million TEUs, marking a year-on-year increase of 19.6%. This volume accounts for 16.5% of the province’s port container throughput, with scale and share remaining among the top in the country. From January to July, the “Japan/South Korea-Dalian-Central Asia” commercial vehicle block train transported 3,700 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 29%, establishing an efficient and convenient logistics corridor between Central Asia and East Asia.

Liaoning has vigorously promoted regulatory reform by guiding 1,514 departments to initiate joint inspection tasks and involving 2,032 departments in coordinated supervision. The proportion of joint departmental tasks across the province has reached 64.42%, enabling “single-entry inspections that cover multiple items” in an increasing number of fields.