BEIJING - China on Wednesday unveiled a new asset management company, with the aim of restructuring uncompetitive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) through stepped-up mergers.

The new firm, named China Reform Holdings Corporation Ltd., will focus on "reorganizing small SOEs which have no bearing on national security and are not crucially important to the national economy," the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), the country's regulator for SOEs said in a statement.

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The first-phase registered capital of the new company, which is wholly owned by SASAC, is 4.5 billion yuan ($681 million). SASAC has not yet revealed which companies will be involved in the reshuffle.

Xie Qihua, former chairwoman of the Baosteel Group Corporation, China's largest steel maker, has been appointed as board chairwoman of the new company. Liu Dongsheng, an SASAC official, will act as the general manager, it said.

"The launch of the new company marks an important move to advance an optimized restructuring of the distribution concerning state-owned economic entities," Wang Yong, deputy director of SASAC, said at the launching ceremony.

The new company will participate in the share-holding reform of those centrally-administered enterprises featuring lesser importance or smaller scale, and will also invest in emerging industries with strategic importance, he said.

China's SOEs include SOEs directly controlled by the central government and SOEs supervised by local governments, but exclude state-owned financial enterprises.

Profits of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the first 11 months hit 1.81 trillion yuan ($271.92 billion), up 43.1 percent year on year, according to figures released by the Ministry of Finance (MOF) on December 17.