The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration of State Council (SASAC) set a goal to cut the number of central enterprises to 80-100 by 2010, of which 30-50 are competitive internationally.

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To achieve the goal, SASAC will have to restructure at least 19 enterprises annually in the next three years. The central government has restructured 76 central enterprises since 2003 and cut the number to 157, down from 196.

Only two more central enterprises were cut during the first four months of 2007. "Mass restructuring has not begun yet, and we are planning a blueprint about it," said Wang Zhigang, director of the enterprise reform and development unit of the Research Institute under SASAC. The administration is expected to finish the plan at the end of the year, Wang added.

The State-owned assets will be gathered in seven key industries - power grid, petroleum and petrochemical, telecommunications, coal, civil aviation, shipping, and military engineering, according to Li Rongrong, director of SASAC. It will also put more efforts in restructuring the automobile, electronic information, construction and steel industries.

The next round of restructuring will mainly take the development of key industries into consideration, not the desires of enterprises. The future enterprise integration may be done mostly by a combination of the powerful, merger of the powerful and the weak, and takeover of enterprises in non-key industries by State-owned assets management firms, said Wang Zhigang.

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