Two groups of data have reflected the innovation vigor of Guangzhou as a major national central city:

 

Since last year, the local government of Guangzhou has been guiding the enterprises to continuously expand input in research and development (R&D). The government has provided subsidies of RMB937 million for 937 enterprises to establish R&D organizations. So far, 2,100 enterprises in Guangzhou have established R&D organizations.

 

Last year, 2,823 high-tech enterprises were established in Guangzhou, 2.5 times as many as that in 2015. In average, seven high-tech enterprises were established every day. In terms of the increment of such enterprises, Guangzhou ranked second nationwide; in terms of the growth rate, it ranked first among the all the cities at vice-provincial level and above. Currently, there are a total of 4,742 high-tech enterprises in Guangzhou.

 

The local government of Guangdong province recently held the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou) On-site Working Conference on Optimized Development. It was proposed that Guangzhou, which is the biggest “engine” of Guangdong province, should “work with full steam” to motivate the economic vigor and impetus of the whole province. Guangzhou is now giving full play to the advantage derived from the concentration of various factors to adhere to the innovation-led principle to develop itself into a “better engine” with stronger driving force. Currently, Guangdong province is sparing no efforts to build the national science and technology innovation center, and Guangzhou is speeding up to play a leading role through the concentration and radiation of innovation resources, aiming to drive an innovative development of the whole province and attract more innovation achievements to Guangdong and promote the transformation of these achievements.

 

Establish connections with global innovation elements through talents

 

Zhou Yi, expert under the “Hundred Talents Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and student of American Professor Thomas S·Huang, who is known as the “ father of computer vision”, works as a go-between for the continuous introduction of the global cutting-edge face recognition technologies to CLOUDWALK, which is company located at Tianhe Software Park. The face recognition rate of such technologies of CLOUDWALK has reached 99.5%.

 

Medprin Biology spent less than three year to realize the industrialization of Redura, which is produced by using 3-D bio-printing technology and can be applied on the damaged part of the mater to promote growth and restoration of regenerated tissues. So far, it has been applied in more than 40 countries and regions. By linking the global resources through global wisdom to promote technical progress, the high-tech enterprises of Guangzhou are leading a “shockwave” through technical renovation to push in-depth industrial reform.

 

Relevant data indicated that, since last year, 46 experts from Guangzhou have been newly covered by the “Thousand Talents Program” of the central government, accounting for 47.9% of the total number of such experts in Guangdong; 52 experts have been newly covered by the “Ten Thousand Talents Program”, accounting for 74.3% of the total number of such experts in Guangdong.

 

Before that, Guangzhou had proposed to promote the construction of the city as a national innovation center, propel high-level and bi-directional opening-up and innovation, and take initiative to integrate into the global innovation network to attract more international innovation resources. Taking the Silicon Valley of the United States, the Route 128 of Boston, Tel Aviv of Israel and other international innovation highlands as examples, Guangzhou strives to develop into a major city for interaction and exchange of talents, intelligence, technologies and capitals.

 

With an active performance on the international “innovation coordinates”, Guangzhou has attracted the attention of the Fortune Global Forum. This year, the forum will be held in Guangzhou.

 

The role as a hub with great radiating ability highlighted

 

The Dongguan-Huizhou Intercity Rail is going to be fully put into operation this year. The platform screen doors were manufactured by Guangdong PCI Group Co., Ltd. Zhang Shaowen, deputy general manager of the company, said that the components of the facilities were manufactured in different cities in the Pearl River Delta. According to his introduction, the doors were manufactured by a glass curtain wall manufacturer in Dongguan, while the ticket gates at the entrances and exits of the subway stations were processed by a hardware factory in Foshan…It indicated that, behind the platform screen door, large-scale industrial cooperation led by Guangzhou is being carried out, and an innovative industry chain covering the whole Pearl River Delta is forming up.

 

The ticket gates for a subway line are worth more than RMB100 million. Such a subway line can bring about orders of RMB20 million for related supporting enterprises in the Pearl River Delta. Incomplete statistics indicated that, each RMB1 billion of output value of smart systems of PCI Group can lead to the generation of output value of RMB5 billion of the traditional industries in the surrounding areas.

 

The economic competition between different countries and regions in the future will tend to happen between the industrial clusters instead of single industries. The cities in the Pearl River Delta have been integrating the domestic resources with the international resources to generate stronger industrial agglomeration and regional agglomeration effects.

 

The innovation activities, for which Guangzhou plays a leading role, show a layout featuring “different objectives in different areas and advancement side by side”, aiming to promote benign interaction between enterprises and industries in different cities and areas and form up more scientific and reasonable layout to ultimately benefit the whole province.

 

High-end innovative projects concentrate in Guangzhou

 

The performance of Guangzhou in attracting foreign investment in 2016 makes an impression. More than 1,600 foreign-funded enterprises made investment in Guangzhou, up 23% year-on-year.

 

Of all the major projects that have been launched or will be launched in accordance with signed contracts, the Cisco Smart City project, with a total investment of RMB20 billion, will become the biggest Internet of Things R&D platform and smart manufacturing and operation platform of Cisco outside the United States. The headquarters of COSCO Shipping Bulk Co., Ltd, which ranks first worldwide in terms of shipping scale, has been located in Guangzhou. This will greatly promotes the construction of international shipping center of Guangzhou. In addition, GE has launched the project to build the bio-industry park in Guangzhou to lead the development of the bio-medicine industry in Guangzhou.

 

Related statistics indicated that, there are a total of more than 150 projects each with total investment of more than RMB30 million made by Cisco, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Foxconn and other enterprises. The total investment of these projects account for more than 90% of the total contracted foreign investment of Guangzhou. A total of 288 Fortune 500 enterprises have made investment in about 800 projects in Guangzhou.

 

Zurich Insurance established a branch in Guangzhou in 2016. Yu Luwei, CEO of Zurich Insurance (China), revealed the primary reason for the establishment of the branch, “The increasingly striking innovation and opening-up of Guangzhou attract us. The entrepreneurs of Guangzhou have a global perspective. There is sound market environment.”

 

Guangzhou has so solid scientific research strength and huge development potential that even the rigorous academic R&D institutions cannot ignore it. Guangzhou now has 19 key national laboratories, 18 national engineering technical research centers, 22 national enterprise technical centers and 14 international science and technology cooperation bases…Relying on the strong “potential energy” of the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, six Cloud supercomputing platforms centering materials science and engineering computing, bio-computing and personalized medical services have been established, with more than 1,600 users and services covering 28 provinces, municipalities as well as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

 

Source: Translated from Invest Guangzhou, February 15, 2017