China's state-assets regulator has outlined a roadmap for the county's powerful state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the coming year to push ahead with its long-championed reforms focused on cutting costs and increasing efficiency.

The Chinese SOEs including such as Sinopec, State Grid and ICBC, account for two fifth of non-agriculture GDP in the world's second-biggest economy, a dominance that economists and rivals say has been associated with high prices and low efficiency in many industries.

The regulator will restrict functionary consumption within SOEs, while restructuring the giant sector by ways including introducing private funding, Wang Yong, head of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, told an economic conference on Monday, which gathered SOE bosses at central level.

The commission will, based on opinions solicited on SOE reforms, lay out "broad objectives", "fundamental ways" and "concrete measure" in 2013, Mr. Wang said.

"More frugal"

The SOEs have to get accustomed to more austerity in the coming year, following massive cuts in functionary consumption and payouts in the first half of the year when global headwinds dampened their profits, Mr. Wang said.

He demanded a "zero growth" in functionary consumption in 2013, and said such spending should be managed under budget discipline.

China's SOEs, which enjoy preferential policy treatment and favorable borrowing conditions from banks, often come under the public eye for what critics call wasteful spending. In 2009, Sinochem was accused of purchasing a chandelier for its headquarters' grand-looking lobby for 12 million yuan (about 1.90 million U.S. dollars).

To achieve the goal, the government should combine reforms on income distribution and personnel system, according to Dr. Zhou Shaopeng, an expert at public economy,

Distributions of income among SOEs could be included into a nation-wide reform of income distributions as part of the country's broader plan to arrest outrageous income gap between the rich and the poor, the professor told Xinhua.

It's worth noting though, a recent plan to reform income distribution across the country, which has been brewing for eight years, was delayed due to resistance from state executives, Caijing learned.

China's SEO bosses are often accorded ministerial level ranking in the party-state hierarchy, and therefore, many are reluctant to change the state quo that the behemoth has enjoyed for so many years.

"To attract private funding into SEO restructuring"

Borrowing from the premier-in-waiting Li Keqiang, "reforms are the biggest dividends we can deploy", Wang Yong told the powerful SOE bosses, many of which are represented as delegates to the country's party congress.

The SOEs should advance the ongoing shareholding reforms by tapping "multiple layers of markets" including private and foreign investors during the restructuring, he said.

China has tried to transform the SOEs into joint stock companies for many years, yielding some results so far. In 2012, eight holdings companies went public both in domestic and foreign markets, and 17 listed Chinese SOEs undertook a rights issue.

To sustain a steady growth remains the priority of the central SOEs, said Wang Yong. Profits gained by the central-level SOEs fell 11.8 percent in the first quarter, and 16.1 percent in the second quarter of the year, he said, thanks to sluggish global economy.

He added though those companies saw a rebound in the third quarter in profits, which would help keep full-year growth flat with that in the past year.

"Business environment will become more complex in 2013," Wang said, adding that that's why a breakthrough in reforms to boost efficiency is so important.