Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, met with executives of Saudi Aramco, BMW, Toyota Motor, FedEx and dozens of other foreign companies at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday as China seeks to boost foreign investment amid worsening trade relations between China and the United States.
It was the third time that Mr. Xi has met with executives of multinationals in the past 17 months, courting investment as sluggish growth and tightening national security laws have made global companies wary of making big bets in China.
More than 40 executives attended Friday’s meeting, including Amin Nasser of Saudi Aramco, Oliver Zipse of BMW, Akio Toyoda of Toyota, Ola Källenius of Mercedes-Benz, Lee Jae-yong of Samsung and Raj Subramaniam of FedEx, as well as the heads of the global shipping company Maersk, the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, the South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix and the pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Sanofi.
Mr. Xi urged the executives to maintain the stability of global supply chains and said China held great potential for investors, according to Chinese state media.
Fresh foreign investment in China has dropped substantially over the past several years. One exception is the German automotive industry, which sees China, the world’s largest car market, as a place to try to compete with increasingly formidable domestic automakers.
German automakers have recently represented as much as half of new investments from the European Union, according to Rhodium Group, a consulting firm. BMW has upped its stake in a Chinese joint venture, and this week announced it would use artificial intelligence technology developed with Chinese tech giant Alibaba in its in-car assistant.
