The office is the sixth after the CECIC started operations in Beijing, and Fuzhou and Xiamen in east China's Fujian province, as well as Guangzhou and Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong province.

The CECIC will provide insurance services to local exporters, especially for high-tech products, machinery and electronic products, said Tang Ruoxin, general manager of the CECIC.

The company announced last April a cut in its premium rate by 10 percent in a bid to attract more clients. The reduction will take effect in the latter half this year.

Shanghai, China's leading financial and industrial center, is the largest port for foreign trade on the Chinese mainland. Before the company settled down here, export credit insurance services were provided jointly by the People's Insurance Company of China and the Import and Export Bank of China.

For years, insurance worth US$730 million has been bought by more than 200 foreign trade firms here, according to the Shanghai office of the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC).

The CECIC would help local exporters expand their businesses with better services in export credit insurance, said Deng Xionghan, deputy director of the CIRC Shanghai office.

The CECIC was founded in May last year as a wholly state-owned enterprise and the first to simply be engaged in policy-oriented export credit insurance, with a registered capital of 4 billion yuan (US $482 million).

According to experts, export credit insurance started in China in 1988, and total export volume has so far reached 18 billion US dollars. But the penetration and recognition of export credit insurance is still low as compared with developed nations.

In 2000 in China, the export volume with credit insurance was merely one percent of the total, and the number of enterprises choosing export credit insurance made up less than eight percent.

(Xinhua News Agency July 31, 2002)