Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong province, is ramping up efforts to promote advanced manufacturing by attaching great importance to the development of digital economy in its aim of delivering high-quality economic development.

Guangzhou has the most all-round industrial structure in South China with 35 of all China's 41 recognized industrial categories operating in the city, according to Xu Zongben, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"We hope Guangzhou will set an example of industrial applications that has never been seen before in the world," Xu said. He added the manufacturing industry is Guangzhou's key advantage, especially intelligent manufacturing.

Ou Jiangbo, director of the Institute of Quantitative Economics at the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, said the city's developed economy, agglomeration of professionals, infrastructure, mature and stable mechanisms and market-oriented operations have laid a solid foundation for emerging industries.

In the first three quarters of this year, Guangzhou's main emerging industries achieved an added value of 465.05 billion yuan ($69.72 billion), a year-on-year increase of 1.3 percent, accounting for 26.6 percent of the city's GDP.

Among them, new-generation information technology, artificial intelligence and biomedicine have achieved growth of 5.8 percent in total added value, data from Guangzhou statistics bureau indicate.

In the first three quarters of 2020, the production of new energy vehicles was accelerated, with a growth rate of 39.2 percent; the production of lithium-ion batteries continued to climb, an increase of 14.2 percent; the production of servers increased by 1.9 times, and the production of integrated circuits increased by 40.4 percent.

Advanced manufacturing contributed to 58.6 percent of the city's industrial added value of those with annual business revenue surpassing 20 million yuan each. The number of high-tech enterprises increased from 8,690 in 2017 to more than 12,000, with 9,540 national technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises, ranking first in the country for two consecutive years.

According to the Three-Year Action Plan for a Strong City in Advanced Manufacturing Industry in Guangzhou (2019-21), issued by the local government, Guangzhou will build two world-class advanced manufacturing clusters for automobiles and Aultra-high-definition video and new displays by 2021, the scales of which are expected to reach 600 billion yuan and 230 billion yuan.

During the 2020 Guangzhou Annual Investment Conference held at the end of August this year, the city signed 266 projects with a total contracted investment of 654 billion yuan. The projects mainly focus on AI, digital economy, financial services, headquarters economy, cold chain logistics and cultural tourism.

The introduction of new projects is injecting fresh blood into Guangzhou's development in advanced manufacturing and the construction of a modern industrial system, helping the city remain competitive.

From January to August this year, Guangzhou's industrial investment totaled 60.1 billion yuan. A large number of key projects involving GAC Motor's intelligent network new energy vehicles, LG Display and BeiGene have been put into production.

Other ongoing projects include the building of the Huawei ecological innovation center, and operations for Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving base and Xiaopeng Motors.

According to data from the Guangzhou bureau of commerce, from January to July this year, there were 1,436 newly negotiated industrial investment projects in the city, a year-on-year increase of 52.76 percent; 449 contracted projects, up 73 percent year-on-year; 538 registered projects, a year-on-year increase of 372 percent; the total contracted investment is 359.47 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 60 percent.

The city also aims to create industry clusters covering new materials, smart homes, organic food, fashion and textiles, lighting and audio, cosmetics, high-end equipment manufacturing such as smart equipment and robots, rail transit equipment, ships and ocean engineering equipment, and biomedicine.

Incentive policies have been introduced to promote the accelerated development of the manufacturing industry in digitalization, networking and intelligence.

By 2022, Guangzhou will build eight major innovations in data circulation governance, 15 experimental platforms, 30 industrial transformation and upgrading projects and 100 technology-leading application scenarios, according to local officials.

Guangzhou ranked 15th among the list of the top 50 Global Research Cities by Nature magazine in 2020, an increase of 10 places from 2018.

Employees assemble parts on GAC Motor's production line in Guangzhou. CHINA DAILY