New home supply in Shanghai will more than triple in March, with 53 new housing projects set to be unveiled. Fifty apartment and three villa projects will be up for sale in the city next month, compared with just 14 projects in February and 18 in January, Soufun.com, the country’s largest real estate website, said. “Real estate developers are also inclined to launch the first batch of campaigns for the year around this time to boost sales,” Soufun added. The Pudong New Area will unveil 16 projects and Jiading district 12, Soufun said. Projects located beyond the city’s Outer Ring Road will account for 76% of new projects with only 4% situated within the Inner Ring Road, Soufun said.

McDonald’s has decided to allow investors with CNY2 million and nine months of training to operate an existing restaurant through franchising. McDonald’s first allowed traditional franchising, in which the licensee leases the restaurant from the corporation, in Jiangsu, Fujian, Sichuan and part of Guangdong provinces in 2010. Lu Yina, Public Relations Director for McDonald’s in China, said the company is confident it can develop its business with three models－directly-operated restaurants, traditional licensing and developmental licensing, in which a local licensee owns the business, including the real estate, and uses his or her own capital and local knowledge to optimize sales.

An increasing number of overseas universities are accepting the Chinese university entrance (gaokao) exam’s results. Up to 60% of colleges and universities in Australia now accept gaokao results after the University of Sydney led the way in 2012, said Zhang Feng, Marketing Manager for Australia and New Zealand projects at EIC Group, an overseas study consultancy. Students from provinces with a maximum gaokao mark of 750, are required to achieve scores ranging from 600 to 660 (a range of 80% to 88%), to gain entry into the University of New South Wales’ undergraduate programs. Li Baoli, Europe Projects Manager for EIC Group, said universities in France, Germany, Italy and Spain are also accepting gaokao students. “The required scores for gaokao in many European universities are much lower than at top domestic universities,” she said. Xiong Bingqi, Vice President of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said the upcoming education reform that removes the English test from gaokao will not have an impact on language skills for domestic students applying for overseas universities. “Besides having to pass language tests for enrollment, such as the IELTS, Chinese students should also improve their language skills for their future life overseas. Therefore, they will still devote themselves to studying foreign languages,” he said.

CSC Nanjing Tanker is poised to become the first central-government-owned company to delist from a Chinese stock market after breaching exchange rules and reporting its fourth consecutive year of losses. Nanjing Tanker is the oil and bulk chemicals marine-freight unit of Sinotrans & CSC. “We’ll be delisted according to securities markets rules if the audited annual results show a loss,” said Ding Wenjin, a Nanjing Tanker Board Member. The Shanghai-listed company is due to report 2013 earnings in April.

China’s effort to build Hainan into a world-class tourist destination encountered a setback last year. The number of foreign visitors to Hainan, China’s most popular island resort, dropped by 7.3% year-on-year to 756,400 in 2013. Lu Zhiyuan, Director of the Provincial Tourism Development Commission, blamed fierce regional competition and airspace restrictions for the decline. In April, Hainan will host the 2014 World Travel and Tourism Council Global Summit, when hundreds of the world’s top tourism experts and agencies will attend a conference in Sanya.