Nantong growing at stable space

City looks to innovation and economic restructuring for continued growth, Ding Congrong, Zhang Ye and Shi Ye report.

Nantong in East China’s Jiangsu province has made great strides in pushing innovation-driven growth and maintaining stable economic development in the context of the new normal economy during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15).

Five cities and counties in Nantong — Haimen, Rugao, Qidong, Haian and Rudong — ranked 22nd, 26th, 36th, 49th and 56th among China's top 100 counties in terms of economic power, according to a survey released by the Zhongjun Research Institute, an economic think tank, in August.

Nantong’s GDP reached 565.3 billion yuan ($88.2 billion) last year, ranking 25th among large and medium cities in the country and representing an increase of 54.8 percent from 2011, according to official statistics.

The city's fixed asset investment reached 389.7 billion yuan last year, an increase of nearly 80 percent from 2010, statistics show. Its total import-export value reached $31.65 billion, an increase of 50 percent from 2010.

"In the first three quarters, Nantong's economy operation has transferred from the mode of rapid growth to that of medium growth, showing signs of the economic new normal,” said Xu Dehua, a chief statistician at the Nantong Statistics Bureau.

"The city has made great progress in accelerating industrialization and urbanization during the 12th Five-Year Plan," Xu said.

Nantong in Jiangsu province has ranked among the top 20 innovative cities on the Chinese mainland for four consecutive years according to Forbes

Restructuring

"Nantong has also sped up economic restructuring by promoting the stable development of agriculture, accelerating that of industry and boosting the service sector during the 12th Five-Year Plan," Xu said.

The proportion of value-added by Nantong’s agriculture and industry to its GDP last year declined by 1.7 percent and 5.3 percent from 2010, while that of the service sector increased by 7 percent, according to the city's statistics bureau.

In 2014, the city's value-added of its service sector reached 250 billion yuan, surpassing that of the industry sector. The output of the high-tech industry accounted for 43.6 percent of total industrial output, an increase of 11.2 percentage points from 2010, and that of emerging industries for 33.1 percent of total industrial output, 11.5 percentage points higher than in 2010.

By the end of last year, the city had 30 companies that were listed on the country's exchange markets.

"Nantong's innovation-oriented growth offers big opportunities for emerging enterprises," said Wang Jinhe, founder of Taojin Group, an e-commerce service provider and one of the emerging enterprises in Nantong.

Taojin Group, based in the Chongchuan Science and Technology Park, has developed over the past four years from a small company with four employees in 2010 into a professional e-commerce provider with 700 employees, more than 1,000 clients and annual sales of nearly 1.2 billion yuan.

Green development

Over the past four years, Nantong has also been making a great effort to conserve energy, reduce emissions and improve the environment.

The city has closed a number of primitive production facilities, improved the water quality of Haohe River and other surrounding rivers and actively dealt with the treatment of industrial waste gas and vehicle exhaust.

In 2014, the output of the city's seven major high-energy consuming industries reached 395.5 billion yuan, accounting for 31.3 percent of the total industrial output and 3.2 percentage points lower than the figure in 2010.

Energy consumption for every 10,000 yuan of Nantong’s GDP fell 17.8 percent last year from 2011.

Improved lifestyles

Li Ming, a retiree who lives in Xingren township in Tongzhou district, said his pension increased from about 3,300 yuan in 2012, when he retired, to more than 4,500 yuan this year.

The average annual income of urban and rural residents in Nantong increased by 11.6 percent annually over the past four years, and that of rural residents by 13.3 percent, according to the city’s statistics bureau.

During the 12th Five-Year Plan period, Nantong instituted a range of measures to increase the incomes of residents and raised the local minimum wage for several consecutive years. The growth of rural residents’ incomes during that period was higher than that of urban residents, statistics show.

In 2014, the monthly average pension for business retirees in the city increased to 1,946 yuan. The per capita disposable income of urban residents in the city reached 33,374 yuan, while that of rural residents rose to 15,821 yuan.

Nantong has also established a social security system that covers more than 98 percent of its population.

In addition, in the first three quarters of this year, 67,000 new jobs were created, meaning 83.7 percent of the annual target of 80,000 new jobs has been met. The urban registered unemployment rate stood at 1.93 percent, 0.12 percentage points lower than the same period last year.

Contact the writers through dingcongrong@chinadaily.com.cn