Hengqin Passes 8,000 Macao-Funded Enterprises as the Zone's First mBridge Remittance Goes Live

HIGHLIGHTS

The Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone recorded two milestones this week that, taken together, describe a jurisdiction moving from policy blueprint to operational infrastructure. On the corporate registry side, the number of Macao-funded enterprises in Hengqin exceeded 8,000 on June 2, a 72.6% increase since the zone was formally established in 2021. These businesses now account for 15.9% of all enterprises in Hengqin — roughly one in six — and their composition is shifting away from traditional trading toward higher value-added categories.

Scientific innovation and information technology firms represent 27.5% of Macao-invested entities. Modern services — commerce, tourism, culture and exhibitions, healthcare — account for 37.5%. The zone has deployed targeted subsidies, including financing support in the hundreds of millions of yuan, streamlined certification for high-tech enterprises, and a pharmaceutical pilot adopting a "Macao registration plus Hengqin production" model. On the cross-border governance side, the zone plans to expand access to Macao's government services and broaden preferential incentives for emerging industries.

The payments layer

On June 5, Bank of China's Hengqin branch, coordinating with its Macao counterpart, executed the zone's first outbound remittance to Macao via the mBridge platform. The transaction involved a government agency in the Cooperation Zone paying service fees to a Macao-based service provider. While modest in size, it connects the zone's public-sector payment flows to the multi-CBDC infrastructure that the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of the UAE, the Bank of Thailand, and the Monetary Authority of Macao have been jointly developing.

mBridge uses distributed ledger technology to enable peer-to-peer, real-time settlement between participating central bank digital currencies. For Hengqin, a jurisdiction designed to integrate Macao's capital and professional services with the mainland's industrial and talent base, access to a low-cost, instant cross-border payment rail reduces the financial friction that otherwise makes cross-boundary business a costlier proposition than domestic transactions. BOC described the operation as creating a "new, secure, and efficient payment and settlement channel" for companies in the zone.

The two data points — 8,000 enterprises and an operational CBDC payment corridor — address different layers of the same integration project. The enterprise count measures the stock of businesses that have placed a regulatory and physical bet on Hengqin. The mBridge transaction tests the financial infrastructure that will determine how cheaply and quickly those businesses can move money between Macao and the mainland. Both numbers are now moving in the same direction.