Taicang aims to deepen relations with Germany

Taicang, a county-level city in Jiangsu province, has vowed to establish a national cooperation platform with Germany and will serve as a model for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Taicang has already attracted 487 German enterprises, with an investment of more than $6 billion and an annual industrial output value of more than 60 billion yuan ($8.69 billion). Six of Germany's top 10 machine tool companies have settled in the city, while eight of its top 20 family businesses have invested in Taicang.

The 15th Taicang Day, which was held on Tuesday in Stuttgart, capital of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, celebrated the long-lasting relationship of the two sides.

Taicang's cooperation with Germany started in 1993, when Kern-Liebers China became the first German-invested company in the city. Over the past 30 years, the company has grown from a workshop with six people to a company with an annual output value of 1.5 billion yuan.

In 2008, the Chinese and German governments recognized Taicang as a Sino-German enterprise cooperation base. At that time, 115 German enterprises had invested in the city. The first Taicang Day was held in Stuttgart that year. Since then, Taicang Day events have been held in Munich, Dusseldorf, Freiburg, Dortmund and other large German cities to demonstrate Taicang's achievements in Sino-German cooperation and the advantages it can provide investors from German-speaking regions, including Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

"Taicang has drawn a large amount of investment from German enterprises and facilitated numerous active economic and cultural exchanges between China and Germany," said Wang Xiangyuan, Party chief of Taicang, in his virtual Taicang Day speech on Tuesday. Taicang now accounts for 10 percent of German manufacturing enterprises in China.

"We believe that the Taicang government will continue to improve the business environment, explore new cooperation areas, innovate cooperation methods, serve the German enterprises well and attract more enterprises to invest in Taicang," said Zhu Weige, the commercial counselor of the Chinese consulate general in Frankfurt, in his speech at the Taicang Day event there.

As one of the four Chinese cities appearing in the 11th China-Germany Economic and Technical Cooperation Forum in Stuttgart on Tuesday, Taicang signed 20 cooperation pacts on industrial development, vocational education and cultural exchanges.