Shenzhen takes the high road to growth

Shenzhen in Guangdong province inked 128 new projects worth 560 billion yuan ($80 billion) on Wednesday as part of its ongoing efforts to unlock high-quality and sustainable growth potential in the city.

Dozens of companies, including Siemens AG, Fosun International Ltd, China Gas Group, ByteDance Co Ltd and Xiaomi Group, signed agreements with the district governments in the city during an investment promotion conference for setting up global headquarters, manufacturing bases, data centers and research and development laboratories.

More such deals are expected in the next few days as city officials announced at the meeting that they would offer 36 land plots spread over 30 square kilometers for outstanding global enterprises. Most of the projects that have been inked meet with city's goals of developing sectors such as 5G communication, advanced manufacturing, biomedicine, artificial intelligence, ocean industries and financial services.

A series of preferential policies in these areas have been released this year, including a sum of 7 billion yuan to attract talents and more than 20 billion yuan to reward technology firms.

The move comes as the city, a cradle of tech giant Huawei and drone maker DJI, is stepping up to shrug off concerns about a slowing economy amid the rapidly changing international environment and the city's high-quality development efforts.

Shenzhen's GDP growth rate during the first three quarters of this year fell to 6.6 percent from 8.1 percent during the same period a year ago. However, the ratio of advanced manufacturing in industry and advanced service sector in the overall services domain exceeded 70 percent. In addition, the total profit of large-scale enterprises rose by 18.5 percent during the period.

Shenzhen Party secretary Wang Weizhong said the figures show that the characteristics of high-quality growth has emerged and the city is now on the road to high-quality and sustainable development.

Speaking about the city's future, Wang said he was confident of continuous growth through continuous reform and opening-up and urged global enterprises to be part of the journey.

Wang said Shenzhen, the nation's best economic zone, had transformed from a small fishing village to be window for China to showcase its reform and opening-up achievements.