Robust investment, trade activities fuel growth amid ‘new four modernizations’

District officials and industrial representatives celebrate the latest signing of agreements on 58 projects in Jiading. — Li Pin

Li Pin and Shi Jingyun

The year 2022 witnessed robust investment and trade activities in Jiading District. Some 59,000 enterprises were added across the suburban district during the period, a year-on-year increase of 7.7 percent and also 5.6 percentage points above the target. Meanwhile, agreements on 228 projects were signed last year, with total investment reaching nearly 100 billion yuan (US$14.7 billion).

On December 30, agreements on 58 projects, with a total invest-ment of more than 17 billion yuan, were collectively signed in Jiading. Among them, 88 percent fell into the “300-billion-level” industries that the district has been building ambitiously, namely the “new four modernizations” (electrification, Internet of Things, intellectualiza-tion and sharing) of automobiles, smart sensors and the IoT, and high-performance medical devices and precision medicine.

The “new four modernizations” automobile projects accounted for 43 percent while foreign invested projects took a 12 percent share.

Over the past year, Jiading has been accelerating the development of the digital economy and digital transformation while exploring the metaverse industry.

Lantian Economic City, an econom-ic development zone in Nanxiang, recently signed a strategic coop-eration framework agreement with Huashi TV, the wholly-owned sub-sidiary of Jetsen Technology Co.

Under the agreement, the two parties will form a deep alliance in multiple fields like metaverse ap-plication, NFT (non-fungible token) collection and blockchain technol-ogy research and development.

“We have planned an over 40,000-square-meter office building not far from the Incity Mega mall in Nanxi-ang which will house a cluster of metaverse enterprises in the future,” said Pei Jiawen, general manager of Lantian Economic City. “Meanwhile, we have also registered a metaverse-related association and been drafting a five-year plan for the development of the industry.”

As the metaverse and game in-dustries are closely related, Lantian Economic City is well-positioned to see metaverse as one of its future growth engines.

Currently, Lantian Economic City has attracted about 1,400 game enterprises, including leading industry players such as YOOZOO, Lilith, miHoYo and HyperGryph. In 2021, the total industry output contributed by game enterprises in Lantian Economic City reached 35 billion yuan, or more than 10 percent of the nation’s total.

Nanxiang Town has been focusing on fostering a number of emerging industries in recent years such as online new economy, animation and games, intelligent manufacturing, and precision medicine.

There are currently more than 59,000 registered firms in the town, including more than 400 high-tech enterprises, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total high-tech com-panies in Jiading.

“Our goal for this year is to es-tablish more than 10 investment promotion institutions with each of them recording annual tax revenue of more than 10 million yuan,” said Li Feng, deputy director of Jiading. “And we hope to attract more than 100 ventures in terms of industrial projects.”

Looking forward, the district will provide better services for en-terprises, improve administrative efficiency, optimize its policies and ensure better implementation of various measures to make itself a magnet for investment, a highland for business cooperation and a place to be for the general public.

Jiading spells out industrial growth plans for the year

JiadingDistrict has announced its industrial project plans for 2023 to accelerate its economic recovery and boost investment.

Aiming to boost its yearly fixed-asset investment by 5 percent, the district expects to sell land parcels for 28 projects, commence construction on 32 projects, finish construction on 30 projects, and put 20 projects into operation during the year.

It said 64 projects have been finalised, encompassing 2,130 mu (142 hectares) of land and an investment of 22.9 billion yuan (US$3.37 billion). Among them, 33 projects are located in Jiading New City, 10 in the North Hongq-iao Business District, and the rest in other areas of the district. Thirteen projects each require an investment of more than 500 million yuan, while 59 are clas-sified as “new growth engine” projects.

At the beginning of this month, CNBG-Virogin Biotech (Shanghai) Co, a Sinopharm subsidiary, saw the smooth delivery of its manufac-turing equipment at the company’s mRNAVaccine Industrialization Base in Nanxiang Town. Mean-while, Shanghai Zhenrentang Pharmaceutical Co launched a 550-million-yuan clinical prep-aration and new drug center project. The project, which will take two years to finish, will employ 270 workers and have an annual output capacity of 1.8 bil-lion yuan.

(Li Huacheng and Shi Jingyun)