A driverless robotaxi glides through the streets of Guangzhou, Guangdong province, slowing to pick up a passenger before merging back into traffic. Roughly 70 kilometers away in Dongguan, robotic arms work in harmony on an assembly line, while in Shenzhen, an engineer uploads a circuit design to an online platform, and within hours the first prototype is already entering production.
Though these technologies appear to belong to different industries, they share one thing in common: many are being developed by private enterprises from Guangdong, China's largest provincial economy and one of the country's most vibrant innovation hubs.
One year after the implementation of the Private Economy Promotion Law — the country's first comprehensive legislation dedicated to promoting private sector development — Guangdong is increasingly emerging as a testing ground where policy support, manufacturing capabilities and entrepreneurial vitality are combining to nurture a new generation of globally competitive industries.
According to the Guangdong Federation of Industry and Commerce, private businesses accounted for more than 95 percent of all market entities in the province by the end of 2025, contributing over 60 percent of its GDP and foreign trade.
More importantly, private businesses have become the backbone of Guangdong's innovation ecosystem, making up more than 80 percent of both the province's national-level "little giant" enterprises and nationally recognized high-tech companies.
Labs to real roads
Few sectors better illustrate Guangdong's push toward innovation-driven growth than autonomous driving.
Founded less than a decade ago in Guangzhou, WeRide has grown into one of the world's leading autonomous driving companies whose automobility services have been deployed in more than 40 cities across 12 countries.
Eyeing an expanded global footprint, in April, WeRide launched robotaxi operations in Singapore through a partnership with Grab, while also rolling out commercial driverless services in Dubai together with Uber, further extending the reach of Chinese autonomous driving technology overseas.
For a private company founded less than 10 years ago to compete on the global stage, "everything starts with technology", said Maeve Zhang, assistant to the president and head of marketing at the company.
Zhang said at the heart of the company's strategy is its self-developed WeRide One universal autonomous driving platform, which allows robotaxis, minibuses, autonomous sanitation vehicles and freight vehicles to share nearly 90 percent of their underlying software architecture and algorithms.
"The unified platform not only reduces development costs, but also gives the company the flexibility to adapt quickly to vastly different operating environments — from tropical downpours in Southeast Asia and extreme heat in the Middle East to Europe's stringent data privacy regulations," Zhang said.
The company's robotaxi fleet has grown from 100 vehicles in 2023 to around 1,300 today, and aims to increase that number to 10,000 by 2029 and 100,000 by 2032, she said.
"There is no finish line for a technology company," Zhang said. "Its technologies must continue to evolve, and the services must also continue to improve."
Behind WeRide's global ambitions lies the strength of Guangzhou's broader automotive ecosystem. As one of the city's three pillar industries, automobile manufacturing grew 5.5 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, while new energy vehicle output surged 36.1 percent.
Production of lithium-ion power batteries for vehicles and intelligent in-car equipment also jumped 41.7 percent and 35.3 percent, respectively, providing fertile ground for the development of next-generation mobility technologies.