Govt offers tax breaks to help small companies

China will implement tax preferential policies to shore up development of small and micro-sized enterprises, according to Finance Minister Xiao Jie on Tuesday.

Enterprises with annual taxable income lower than 500,000 yuan are eligible to have their taxes cut in half, said Xiao.

Prior to this year, only enterprises with annual taxable income lower than 300,000 yuan were eligible for the tax cut policy.

"New tax break policies to be introduced this year are expected to further reduce 350 billion yuan of tax compared to last year," said Xiao.

Xiao added that China will continue to improve the value-added-tax system to better help reduce tax burden of small and micro-sized enterprises.

The value-added-tax reform, which began in 2012 and has seen business tax replaced with VAT, has resulted in companies making total tax savings of 570 billion yuan last year, data from the State Administration of Taxation showed.

With an expected smaller amount of tax collected from enterprises, the government at all levels should cut expenditures, Xiao added.