Taizhou city gets off to great start boosting key projects

The Taizhou Medical High-tech Zone basks under a splendid blue sky. [Photo provided etaizhou.gov.cn]

The city of Taizhou, in East China's Jiangsu province, has been pushing hard to boost key projects and speed up its development since the start of this year.

Taizhou held a commencement ceremony for 79 healthcare projects, involving total investment of 27.79 billion yuan ($3.99 billion), on Feb 6.

As a pilot city for the launch of health industry clusters in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, Taizhou is picking up its pace to become a mecca for the medical and health sector – with a global influence – and is striving to increase the sector's scale to 400 billion yuan by 2025.

Meanwhile, the city's four competitive industry clusters are also seeing a good start to the year. Flagship projects – such as the 12 billion yuan Qingshan Industrial Park project and a new drug research and development center and production base with a combined investment of $1.58 billion – are progressing well.

The main economic indicators of Taizhou are also said to have done well in January in preliminary figures. The general public budget revenue, fixed assets investment and total retail sales of consumer goods are projected to have increased by 5 percent, 8 percent and 5 percent, respectively, during the month.

Since the start of the year, Taizhou has rolled out a series of policies. These are designed to boost the local economy, bolster businesses and stabilize the jobs market, reduce taxes and fees, as well as support enterprises to go global. As a result, nearly 90 percent of the leading enterprises have either repeated order levels or recorded more orders than before in the period.

According to preliminary statistics, in the first quarter, Taizhou planned to construct 163 industrial projects with a total investment of 92.32 billion yuan. That compares with annual planned investment which was projected to reach 39.72 billion yuan this year.

According to Liu Yong, founder of Taizhou-based biotech company Recbio,  the latest policies introduced by the municipal government to promote economic recovery really boosted the confidence of local enterprises.

Furthermore, all the county-level cities and districts of Taizhou are widely said to be poised for high-quality growth this year. What’s more, they have undertaken measures to improve their administrative services for enterprises and to optimize the business environment for investors.

Gaogang district, which is home to a pharmaceutical high-tech zone, is geared up to make every effort to start construction on 50 projects with an investment of 500 million yuan and $30 million and to complete 25 of the projects in the current year.

It's expected to take full advantage of the local supportive policies to develop itself into a core area for high-quality growth of the big health industry in Taizhou.