Shanghai plans $132b high-end projects

At least 100 high-level industrial projects will be built in Shanghai in the next few years with total industrial investment projected to top 850 billion yuan ($132 billion) during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), according to a plan released by the municipal government on Thursday.

The development of high-end industries will be the highlight of Shanghai's advanced manufacturing industry in the coming years, according to the latest plan.

Integrated circuits or ICs, biomedicine and artificial intelligence, which are defined as the three "pioneering" industries in Shanghai, shall see their respective scale more than double by the end of 2025.

The annual turnover of Shanghai's IC industry surged 21 percent year-on-year to 207 billion yuan in 2020. The city saw the industrial value of the biomedicine industry exceed 600 billion yuan last year while that of AI reached 220 billion yuan.

Six key industrial clusters of information technology, life sciences, automobiles, high-end equipment, new materials and high-end consumer goods will be formed by 2025, according to the plan.

To be specific, the industrial value of new-type display devices and services is expected to reach 70 billion yuan by 2025, while that for smart sensors should reach 80 billion yuan. The sales revenue of software and information services should exceed 1.5 trillion yuan by the end of 2025.

The industrial value of high-end medical devices is expected to be 60 billion yuan by 2025. While Shanghai churned out 238,600 new energy vehicles in 2020, the annual output should exceed 1.2 million units by 2025, helping the industry's value top 350 billion yuan.

While Shanghai's advanced manufacturing companies used to be the followers of world's top industry players, they should keep up with the pace of industry big names and even take the lead globally in the next few years, a goal that prompted the release of the plan, said Shanghai's Vice-Mayor Wu Qing.

Shanghai-based manufacturing companies should master more core technologies by 2035 so that "made-in-Shanghai" will become a new tag of the city, he said.

Progress will also be made in frontier industries such as next-generation telecommunications, brain-inspired intelligence and deep sea exploration. The knowledge-intensive services sector serving production ends should take up at least two-thirds of the city's total added value of the services sector by 2025, with general contracting, research and development, design services and industrial e-commerce making substantial progress.

Over 5,000 industry leaders shall be nurtured in the next few years, the plan stated. Lin-gang Special Area, the part included in the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone in 2019, will become a new strategic driver, as it will likely account for at least one-third of Shanghai-based manufacturing industry's growth by 2025.

To support the development of advanced manufacturing industry in the city, financial institutions in Shanghai will be encouraged to take part in more industrial investment funds, said Ge Ping, deputy director of Shanghai's municipal financial bureau.