Industrial chain sharpens China's edge

"Targeted policies will be introduced to boost the stable growth of pillar industries, such as automobiles and electronics, while efforts should be made to cultivate fresh growth points in new energy, new materials and other emerging industries," he said.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China has been the world's largest manufacturing power in terms of industrial output for years. It is also the only country in the world that has developed all the industrial categories listed in the United Nations industrial classification.

"China is a unique ultra-large single market in the world, and the Chinese market is key to stabilizing the supply of the global industrial chain," said Huang Qifan, former mayor of Chongqing and executive academic vice-president of the China Institute for Innovation & Development Strategy.

The single market, according to him, is "unified" in law system, tax system, business rules and other factors that are key to economic development. India, for instance, typifies a fragmented national market governed by different state-level law systems and business rules, he said.

"Thus, such a single market advantage (in China) can greatly lower costs related to manufacturing, research and development, fixed asset investment, logistics, market development and even raw material procurement. This scale advantage can reduce 30 percent to 40 percent of the entire manufacturing costs," he said.

In Huaqiangbei, an area in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, known for electrical goods, local electronic component traders have built a trade ecosystem with the help of WeCom, Tencent's enterprise communication platform.

Via WeCom, 2,000 local upstream and downstream small and medium-sized traders are connected. As business opportunities can be shared in real time on the sidebars of WeCom, these SMEs can communicate with each other and dock businesses directly.

"Electronic component transactions are usually in huge amounts and fragmented, and it is really hard to find suitable orders offline. But with WeCom, transaction efficiency can be greatly improved," said Peng Jiaying, president of Shenzhen Mecrli Technology Co Ltd.

Data from WeCom showed that expressions of intent for the docking of electronic components on the platform increased by 186 percent in February compared with the previous month.

"As China's economy continues to stabilize this year, the surging domestic demand will continue to drive it to be a market that no multinational wants to lose," said Wang Peng, a researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.