Suzhou is the first Chinese city, excluding provincial capitals, to have more than 10,000 high-tech companies, as the metropolis in eastern Jiangsu province benefits from its proximity to Shanghai. Across the country, the number of high-tech firms is on the rise as more cities develop the conditions to upgrade their industries.

Suzhou had 13,473 high-tech companies last year, Yicai learned after combing through local government data. Dongguan, which is known as “the world’s factory,” secured second place with 9,099 high-tech firms, followed by Foshan with 8,700.

Suzhou, which is home to many companies in emerging sectors such as biomedicine, chips and artificial intelligence, is benefiting from the spillover effect from Shanghai’s economy, said Ding Changfa, an associate professor of economics at Xiamen University. Its local manufacturing sector is quite advanced and companies are investing a lot in research and development.

Dongguan is an electronics and information technology base and many leading companies such as Huawei Technologies, Oppo Mobile Telecommunications, Vivo Communication Technology, Dongguan Huabei Electronic Technology, Lens Technology and Shengyi Technology are located here, Ding said. The municipality provides a complete industrial chain from the production of basic components to the manufacturing of end products, he added.

In all, there were 15 cities that are not provincial capitals with more than 2,000 high-tech companies last year, of which four, namely Wuxi and Changzhou in Jiangsu province as well as Wenzhou and Jiaxing in southeastern Zhejiang province, have more than 3,000 such firms.

All these 15 cities, apart from Quanzhou in southeastern Fujian province, are located in the giant economic hubs of the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

In the central, western and northwestern parts of the country, only five cities have more than 1,000 high-tech firms. These are Wuhu, the second-largest city in eastern Anhui province, Chuzhou, which is also in Anhui province and neighbors the provincial capital of Jiangsu province called Nanjing, Luoyang, which is the second-largest city in central Henan province, as well as Yichang and Xiangyang in central Hubei province.

These cities have a good industrial basis and they play a prominent role as regional centters, Niu Fengrui, head of the think tank Guoxin Small and Medium Cities Index Research Institute, told Yicai. All these attributes provide support in terms of industries, technologies and talent for the growth of local high-tech sectors.

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