China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) plummeted in July, but a Ministry of Commerce Spokesman denied the fall was related to an anti-monopoly investigation. Foreign investors channeled USD7.8 billion of funds into China last month, down 16.9% from a year earlier. “The decline in a single month can’t be used to interpret a general trend,” Spokesman Shen Danyang said. Shen said the anti-monopoly investigation, which began late last month and involved multinationals including Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft and Qualcomm, was not solely targeted at foreign companies. Shen said the majority of foreign companies were able to abide by Chinese laws and it was impossible for foreign companies to be “scared away” by the investigation. He added that the government would be closely monitoring the trend of global investment and would further open the market and provide better services for investors. In the first seven months, foreign direct investment (FDI) edged down 0.35% to USD71.1 billion with 13,247 new foreign ventures being established on the Chinese mainland. Investment from Japan dropped 45.4% during the January-July period, while investment by the United States, the European Union and the ASEAN countries dropped by 17.4%, 17.5% and 12.7% respectively. In comparison, funds from the UK jumped 61.2% during the period, and those from South Korea rose 34.6%. China’s top 10 sources of foreign investment last month were, in order, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Germany, Britain, France and the Netherlands.

China’s outbound direct investment (ODI) expanded 4% to USD52.5 billion in the January-July period, the first increase since February after the effect of a high comparative base had diminished, the Shanghai Daily reports. China’s ODI will maintain a “quite fast, probably 10%” growth pace this year, Shen Danyang said. “It will be a new feature for China’s outward direct investment to maintain a relatively robust growth and exceed the inflow of foreign direct investment in the near future.” By the end of July 2014, China’s accumulated ODI in non-financial sectors had reached USD578.2 billion. In the first seven months of this year, China’s outward investment in the European Union surged 293.1% year-on-year, Japan by 160.9% and Russia by 91.1%. Spending in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) rose 9.1% to USD2.89 billion and that in the United States increased 12.8% to USD2.82 billion in the same period.