Paid foreign investment in Tianjin in the first half of this year reached 4.928 billion dollar, up 20.5% year-on-year, the fastest in growth rate among China’s cities and third largest in scale after Suzhou and Shanghai, according to the Tianjin Statistics Bureau.

The city’s largest investor is still Hong Kong, which has over 3.004 billion dollar contracted and 2.272 billion dollar paid, up 0.9 percent and 22.8 percent year-on-year, respectively, and accounting for 46.1% of the city’s total foreign investment.

Hong Kong’s investment has focused on storage, aviation, computer serving and manufacturing in Tianjin’s Xiqing and Wuqing economic development areas.

South Korea, however, is Tianjin’s fastest growing investor, with contracted investments of $747 up 3.2 times as much as last year.

South Korea is very near Tianjin; it only takes one and half hours to fly to Tianjin from Seoul.

2,391 South Korean enterprises, including Samsung, LG and Hyundai, have invested in the city as of March, 2007, and over 30,000 Koreans live here.

The Binhai New Area, a special economic area that has helped drive Tianjin’s economic growth, attracted contracted foreign capital of $5.56 billion, up 18.5 percentage points year-on-year. Utilized foreign capital increased by 2.94 billion dollar, up 28.6 percentage points. 59.8 percent of the municipality’s foreign capital was invested there.

2.52 billion dollar foreign capital was actually used in the first half of the year, slightly down compared to the same period of last year.

Tianjin has become China's third fastest-growing city despite the global economic downturn thanks to huge investment stimulus. According to the statistics from the Tianjin Statistics Bureau, Tianjin's gross domestic product (GDP) was 315.485 billion Yuan in the first half of 2009, 16.2 higher than the same period last year, and 9.1 percent higher than the national average.