Shenzhen hi-tech zone to house 2,000 new firms

Shenzhen National High-Tech Zone plans to add an additional 2,000 high-tech enterprises to its premises this year, according to a government meeting on the city's high-tech industrial development on Monday.

Enterprises engaged in frontier industries such as AI, integrated circuits, new energy, robotics, life health and new materials will be preferred, according to information disclosed at the meeting.

The zone, totaling 159.48 sq km and comprising five industrial parks in Nanshan, Pingshan, Longgang, Bao’an and Longhua districts, will house more than 60 percent of Shenzhen's total high-tech enterprises, meeting attendees were told.

Aiming to become a world-class high-tech park, the zone will cultivate a first-class ecosystem chain for facilitating the development of innovative businesses by building key infrastructures, labs, test bases, innovation incubators, research institutes and service agencies.

The zone's Nanshan park is intended to develop into the main comprehensive national-level science center of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

In the next few years, the Nanshan park will speed up construction of the Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, SUSTech Institute of Microelectronics, Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory and Nobel Laureate Laboratory.

The park will also dismantle old factories to add 3.5 million sq meters of floor space for industrial development.

Shenzhen's first united headquarters building will also be located in the Nanshan park to house 15 high-tech firms, 12 of which will be listed companies.

The zone's Pingshan park, occupying 51.6 square kilometers, is the largest among the five parks across the city. It is divided into the southern and northern areas. The northern area features a new-energy industry headquarters while the southern area, where Shenzhen Technology University is located, is focused on education, intelligent manufacturing and innovative services.

In 2019, the Pingshan park will provide an additional 50,000 sq km of land for industrial development through urban rejuvenation and upgrading old industrial parks.

Shenzhen National High-Tech Zone, inaugurated in 1996, was transformed from Shenzhen Science and Technology Park, which was set up in 1985.

It is China's second-largest national high-tech zone in terms of area and ranks No 2 in GDP among the 157 national high-tech parks, following Zhongguancun in Beijing, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

It yielded 24.4 billion yuan ($3.87 billion) of GDP and 4.3 billion yuan of tax revenue per square kilometer in 2018, the biggest among all its counterparts in the country. It accounted for 15 percent of the city's total patent applications and yielded nearly 12 percent of the city's total industrial output value last year. One-sixth of Shenzhen's national-level high-tech enterprises are based in the zone