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Accelerating the comprehensive green and low-carbon transformation in the economy and society has become one of the most urgent tasks for China to achieve its carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals. As the microsubjects of the economic system, enterprises'outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) activities have created favorable external conditions for fully utilizing both domestic and international markets and resources to promote green transition. In view of this, based on micro data of Chinese listed companies from 2009 to 2019, this study innovatively constructed the instrumental variable of enterprise business environment openness and adopted the Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) method to empirically test the impact mechanism of enterprises' OFDI on green transition. Moreover, the business scope of enterprises' overseas investments mainly covered business services, local production, technology research and development, resource exploitation, etc. This study theoretically summarized the possible mechanism for enterprises with different services in their business scope to advance their own green transition process and designed an intermediary effect model to verify the existence of this mechanism. The findings suggested that: ① OFDI would significantly improve enterprise green transition. ② The above empirical results were still robust when replacing the dependent variable named enterprise green transition index with sub indicators, shortening the time window, lagging the control variables for one period, and supplementing omitted variables containing executive overseas experience and corporate political connections. ③ Further mechanism testing showed that OFDI in business services would positively affect green development through economies of scale and competition effect, while OFDI in production and technology would have a promoting effect on enterprise transformation and upgrading via export effect and reverse technology spillover respectively. This research not only provides micro-level empirical evidence for objectively evaluating the green transition effect on enterprises, but also offers useful policy implications and suggestions for better guiding enterprises to 'going out'. The government should unswervingly adhere to the 'going out' policy, encourage enterprises to engage in foreign investments, and further promote marketing, production and technical cooperation with the host countries in various forms. Meanwhile, enterprises need to fully utilize their differentiation advantages in outward investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]