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Jiaxing in East China's Zhejiang province announced new measures on Jan 7 to assist local companies amid the COVID-19 pandemic this year, according to a news conference held in the city.

The measures are expected to exempt local companies from about 33.6 billion yuan ($5.22 billion) in fees, including 30 billion yuan in taxes, and issue about 3 billion yuan in rewards and subsidies.

The service industry is the key recipient of rewards and subsidies. Companies in the service industry will receive respective 50,000 yuan or 500,000 yuan in subsidies if their annual operating revenues exceed 500 million yuan or 5 billion yuan for the first time.

Knowledge-intensive companies that register in Jiaxing this year and have an annual prime operating revenue of 20 million yuan will receive a one-time award of 100,000 yuan.

To help local companies expand markets, the Jiaxing municipal bureau of commerce will lower the threshold for the opening of stores on third-party cross-border e-commerce platforms from more than $200,000 in annual online cross-border trade to just $100,000.

The bureau is also encouraging local companies to establish their own cross-border e-commerce platforms by increasing subsidies from a maximum of 50,000 yuan to the current 200,000 yuan.

In addition, Jiaxing will reduce the time needed for administrative procedures for refunding export taxes to just three working days.