Positioning India to emerge as an attractive destination for foreign companies relocating from China, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today said the measure to slash tax to 15 per cent for new companies now pitched the country in competition.

Emphasising the notification on the new measure will come out with details, the minister said besides reduced tax rates, absence of Minimum Alternate Tax and no sunset clause made the measure most competitive among countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, which were aggressively wooing firms moving out of China.

In addition to the advantage of English-speaking country in which the Philippines could take a march, now India’s 15 per cent tax rate for new companies plus other measures made it most attractive, the minister said in an informal interaction with a select group of journalists here.

For instance, she said, if a major manufacturer like Apple set up a manufacturing plant, it came with an entire eco-system since components/sub-components were made by other companies and assembled for the end product. With uncertainty looming over the eventual fall out of the ongoing trade war between the US and China, there were estimates that at least 40 per cent of the US companies were planning to shift their supply chains outside China, favoured as a low-cost manufacturing choice.

On tax cuts of corporate companies, she expressed optimism that more money in the hands of companies would allow them to deploy additional resources optimally. The government, she said, was not cutting down expenditure and on the contrary, Expenditure Secretary was holding regular meetings with department secretaries asking them to spend allocated funds. Targets, too, were not being revised and would be done when the ministry assessed revised estimates, she said.