On 25, Feb., Logistics industry was made to be the 10th industry in the National Reviving Plans for Ten Important Industries. The state council examined and approved the reviving plans for logistics industry.
On 13, Mar., The state council officially launched the Adjusting and Reviving Plan for Logistics Industry (called "Plan" hereinafter) in which the following purposes are listed: Improving the current difficult situation for the logistics companies in 2009; Fostering some large integrated logistics enterprise groups with international competitiveness; Increasing the logistics industry added value at an average annual growth rate of over 10%; Decrease the ratio of the total logistics expense of the whole society to GDP.
Meanwhile, the Plan brought forward the following ideas：Putting emphases on the development of nine logistics regions; Building ten logistics channels and make some cities as logistics hub; Optimizing the regional distribution of the logistics industry.
The nine logistics regions include: the North China Region with Beijing & Tianjin as the center; the Northeast Region with Shenyang & Dalian as the center; the Shandong Region with Qingdao as the center; the Yangtze Delta Region with Shanghai, Nanjing & Ningbo as the center; the Southeast Coast Region with Xiamen as the center; the Pearl River Delta Region with Guangzhou & Shenzhen as the center; the Central Region with Wuhan & Zhengzhou as the center; the Northwest Region with Xi’an, Lanzhou, Urumchi as the center and the Southwest Region with Chongqing, Chengdu & Nanning as the center.
The Plan also made 21 cities as the National Hub Cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and 17 as Regional Hub Cities including Harbin and Haikou.
The Plan called for the breakthrough of the limit of administrative regionalization, asked people to spur the logistics development according to the economic regionalization and the objective law of the logistics development. The plan also suggested that different regions should promote and deepen their cooperation with each other and integrate the logistics resources across the regions to form the regional integration of the logistics service pattern gradually.
Besides, Nine Important Projects also be decided in the Plan: Facilities for multi-model transportation and transshipment, Logistics Park, Urban Distribution, Bulk commodities and Rural logistics, Combined development of Manufacturing industry and Logistics industry, Promotions of logistics standards and technologies, Public information platform for logistics, Logistics technologies developing and Project for emergency logistics.
In terms of projects for bulk commodities and rural logistics, the Plan proposed to accelerate the construction of Coal Logistics Channel, take the outbound coal transportation of Shanxi, Nei Mongol, Shaanxi as the pivot, and form some integrated projects of Coal, Electricity, Road and Port. The Plan also made suggestions to strengthen the construction of Oil & Gas Terminals and transportation network, to build more facilities for port logistics of important mineral products and improve and upgrade the facilities for large equipments, to quicken the modern logistics facilities for food supplies and build some interprovincial logistics channels & important logistics hub for food supplies, to speed up the construction of the two projects: North-to-south Food Transportation Project and West-to-East Coal Transportation Project.
However, the rumor went around in the logistics industry before saying that the government will lower the business tax rate of warehousing and distributing companies and enlarge the scope of collecting business tax according to rate difference, was not mentioned in the Plan.