Accelerate stitching, another "trillion" city is coming?

National Business Daily

2024-07-01 23:27National Business Daily official account

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01Shenzhen and Zhongshan jointly carried out research on the cross-river low-altitude flight network and the recent operation demonstration plan, and the low-altitude economy has become the direction of Shenzhen's cross-river industrial development.

02 Shenzhen has more than 1,700 drone companies, with an annual output value of 96 billion yuan, accounting for 10% and 63% of the country, showing the basis of industrial spillover.

03Due to the vast land resources of cities in western Zhuhai, Shenzhen's industries have further spilled over, and cities in western Zhuhai, such as Zhongshan and Jiangmen, are expected to achieve industrial upgrading with the help of low-altitude economy.

04On the other hand, cities in western Zhuhai, such as Zhongshan and Jiangmen, are expected to drive the transformation of local traditional industries through the development model of "Shenzhen chain master + Zhuxi supporting" and "Shenzhen headquarters + manufacturing in Zhuxi".

05The low-altitude economy is expected to become a lead for the industrial development of western Zhuhai and promote the economic reconstruction of the Greater Bay Area and even the entire Guangdong.

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Every reporter: Yang Qifei Every editor: Liu Yanmei

Image source: Xinhua News Agency

125,000 trips, which is the traffic flow of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Corridor in 24 hours.

"Opening is saturation", so that Shenzhen has accelerated the discussion in Zhuxi into reality.

Not long ago, the Action Plan for Further Promoting the Integration of Shenzhen-Zhongshan Planning (2024-2025) was officially issued, and as the only cross-city planning study involving specific industries, the two cities will "jointly carry out research on cross-river low-altitude flight network and recent operation demonstration scheme".

Combing the actions in recent months, the low-altitude economy has become a "bright line" for Shenzhen's industrial "cross-river" -

Two months ago, as the first commercial cross-sea low-altitude logistics route in the Greater Bay Area, the Shenzhen-Zhongshan cross-sea low-altitude logistics route completed its first flight, and the two cities subsequently established the Shenzhen-Medium-Low Altitude Economic Industry Alliance; Jiangmen is also making efforts, and many municipal districts are building "reverse enclaves" with low-altitude economy and carrying out investment promotion activities; Zhuhai is one of the three low-altitude economic core cities identified by Guangdong.

Image source: Xinhua News Agency

Looking back on the industrial development process of the Pearl River Delta, round after round of industrial innovation has made the east bank of the Pearl River continue to become the place where Schumpeterian "disruptive innovation" occurs. This time, with the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Corridor crossing the river to the west, can the low-altitude economy pull the "trigger" of the industrial restructuring of Zhuxi and form a new internal vitality?

Another "electronic information industry"?

Not long ago, the news that the "pureblood" Hongmeng officially started testing came from Dongguan.

As a model of Shenzhen's industrial spillover, Huawei has undergone a new round of transformation and upgrading in Dongguan, driving Dongguan enterprises to start a new round of intelligent transformation. Dongguan's only trillion-dollar industry, the electronic information industry has also sprouted a new growth point.

In a sense, under the spillover of Shenzhen's electronic information industry, Dongguan has achieved its own breakthrough.

The two cities have moved from "three to one supplement" to the middle and high end of the global value chain, and the intelligent terminal industry cluster has joined hands to enter the list of national advanced manufacturing clusters, and Dongguan has also completed the transformation to a trillion city.

Can Shenzhen's manufacturing, which is still developing rapidly, give birth to the next industry with a driving effect? The low-altitude economy began to come to the forefront.

According to data from the Civil Aviation Administration, the size of the mainland's low-altitude economic market is expected to reach 1.5 trillion yuan in 2025 and soar to 3.5 trillion yuan in 2035, which is expected to rewrite the "new energy vehicle miracle".

Among the competitors, Shenzhen is particularly dazzling - as of the end of last year, there were more than 1,700 drone companies in Shenzhen, with an annual output value of 96 billion yuan, accounting for 10% and 63% of the country respectively, showing the basis for industrial spillover.

And this time, "crossing the river" has become the necessary direction for Shenzhen.

Shenzhong Channel Image source: Southern + client

According to Lin Jiang, a professor at Lingnan College of Sun Yat-sen University, the intensity of urban land development on the east bank of the Pearl River is generally high, and Shenzhen is even more "every inch of land".

As far as the low-altitude economy is concerned, the maximum range of intercity low-altitude flight is 300 kilometers, and there is a "one-hour ecosystem" in the layout of the low-altitude flight industry chain.

In turn, the synergy and cooperation with Shenzhen is also an opportunity that the western cities of Zhuxi do not want to miss. Amplify the advantages of its own land resources and become an important capital for its solicitation of cooperation.

Taking Zhongshan as an example, with the help of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Channel, the local Feipai International (unmanned system) Intelligent Manufacturing Industrial Park, Fukun Dawan Area (Zhongshan) Low-altitude Economic Industrial Park, Zhongshan Fusha Low-altitude Economic Industrial Base and other industrial platform carriers can provide development conditions for the low-altitude economy. Jiangmen chose to build a "reverse enclave" in Shenzhen, in order to link more Shenzhen enterprises to Jiangmen through cross-city industrial chain collaboration.

Zhongshan City Image source: Zhongshan release (photo by Ming Jian)

Through the development model of "Shenzhen Chain Main + Zhuxi Supporting" and "Shenzhen Headquarters + Made in Zhuxi", Zhuxi City also intends to take advantage of the introduction of low-altitude economy to drive local traditional industries to take the transformation express.

For example, for the establishment of the Shenzhen-Medium-Low Altitude Economic Industry Alliance, a local enterprise mentioned in an interview that since Zhongshan's traditional enterprises had little contact with the low-altitude economic field before, through the industry alliance and the organization of industry consultations, enterprises can understand as soon as possible what kind of products they can provide for the low-altitude economic field, so as to participate in and empower the development of Zhongshan's low-altitude economy.

Waiting for a "bursting" Zhuxi

The cities of western Zhuhai, represented by Zhongshan and Jiangmen, have been looking forward to welcoming a landmark emerging industry and pushing the city into a new stage of development.

Although the three cities in western Zhuhai have large differences in area, their economic volume is roughly the same. Different from the trillion-dollar cities on the east bank of the Pearl River, the GDP of Zhuhai, Zhongshan, and Jiangmen in 2023 will be 423.322 billion yuan, 385.065 billion yuan, and 402.225 billion yuan respectively, which is still far from crossing the trillion threshold.

The small size of the industry is a common problem faced by the three cities. Zhongshan, which has the highest industrial added value, will only be 167.78 billion yuan in 2022, which is below 200 billion yuan. If you look at it in the Yangtze River Delta, the cities in the same interval are Huzhou and Wuhu.

But there is no shortage of stories of industrial prosperity in the three cities.

Taking Zhongshan as an example, since the 80s of the last century, with the industrial development model of "one town, one product", Zhongshan has emerged with famous industrial business cards such as Shaxi clothing, Xiaolan hardware, Dachong mahogany, and lamp lighting, and is known as the "Four Little Tigers of Guangdong" together with Shunde, Nanhai and Dongguan. However, until now, Zhongshan's main advantageous industries have remained the same as they were decades ago, and the industry is more traditional and generally less competitive.

Also stemming from the historical genes, industry is still the most important foundation for the development of the three cities. Reflected in the local industrial narrative, Zhongshan "has accumulated 33 industrial categories, 3 100 billion yuan and 12 10 billion yuan industrial clusters, with a solid industrial supporting foundation"; Jiangmen is "an old industrial city in Guangdong, with a good industrial foundation and complete categories".

In 2022, the total industrial output value of Zhongshan, Zhuhai and Jiangmen will all be in the range of 500 billion yuan to 700 billion yuan. From the perspective of Guangdong Province, after Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan and Huizhou, the three cities are considered to be the most likely to take the lead in reaching the total industrial output value of one trillion yuan.

Zhuhai night view Image source: photo.com_500540557

The question is, how to revitalize the existing industrial base and let the next "trillion industrial city" appear earlier? One feasible strategy is to cultivate a leading industry.

Looking further, Changzhou, the new "new energy capital", undoubtedly benefits from the government's effective "venture capital" for the power battery industry, but equally important is the integration and drive of emerging industries for their own industrial base.

Some analysts have pointed out that Changzhou has 37 of the 41 industrial categories, 191 of the 207 medium categories, and 600 of the 666 sub-categories. Among the more than 5,700 industrial enterprises above the designated size in Changzhou, 40% are equipment manufacturing, and Changzhou's intelligent manufacturing equipment industry has been selected as the first batch of national strategic emerging industrial clusters. Based on this kind of industrial supporting force, "once there is a new outlet, Changzhou may 'break out in situ'".

Looking closer, Dongguan, which has been "transformed" by several rounds of transformation of the electronic information industry, is now also planning a new "opening way" of the city's industrial pattern. Last year, Dongguan included the creation of a "national Hongmeng intelligent manufacturing city" as an annual goal and task to promote Hongmeng to empower Dongguan's intelligent manufacturing.

For the current cities in western Zhuhai, the low-altitude economy is also expected to become a lead for the industrial development of western Zhuhai.

On the one hand, as the pole of western Zhuhai, Zhuhai has accumulated the advantages of low-altitude economy, according to the "Urban Low-altitude Economy "Linking Power" Index Report (2024) jointly released by National Business Daily, Urban Evolution Theory and Flint Creation, Zhuhai ranks 18th in the national urban low-altitude economy "Linking Power" index;

On the other hand, including the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Channel, the opening of various channels has brought "foreign aid" to Shenzhen, and a "reservoir" of low-altitude economic industry is expected to appear in Zhuxi.

Rewriting the "Silicon Valley Model" with Industrial Innovation

Behind the low-altitude economy "stitching" industries on both sides of the Pearl River, a global industrial development model of the Bay Area has also surfaced.

Song Ding, a researcher at CDI, a national high-end think tank, wrote an analysis that although it has been five years since the release of the "Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area", from the actual operation, "the basic structure of the urban agglomeration has been erected, and the cooperation between various cities in the Bay Area is also steadily advancing", but "the overall economy, science and technology, economic and trade cooperation in the Greater Bay Area is still in the superficial stage, lacking sufficient breadth and depth".

In fact, the development of the Greater Bay Area is based on the successful experience of the world-renowned Bay Area.

The first step in building the channel has so far been encrypted and connected by the Humen Bridge, the Nansha Bridge and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, but it has not yet played a more in-depth leading role in dredging the barriers between the east and west sides of the estuary and strengthening the economic and technological exchanges and interactions between the two sides of the strait.

In the second step, Hong Kong universities have "gone north", but due to historical shortcomings, no university in the Greater Bay Area has yet been able to play a leading role similar to Stanford University.

The Shenzhen-Zhongshan Corridor is known as the "key horizontal", because it happens to connect cities with strong drops on both sides of the Pearl River, and under the "depression filling effect" mentioned by Song Ding, Shenzhen's industrial potential energy is transformed into spillover kinetic energy, and the perennial lack of communication between the two sides of the Pearl River is broken by industrial flow.

As Lin Jiang observed, this kind of flow began to appear even at the beginning of the construction of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Corridor. For example, as early as around 2021, based on the construction expectations of the corridor, Zhuhai and Zhongshan successively proposed the Shenzhen-Zhuhai Cooperation Demonstration Zone and the Shenzhen-China Cross-River Integrated Development Demonstration Zone.

Zhongshan Cuiheng New District Image source: Southern + client

In a sense, compared with the logic of channels and universities, the industrial logic plays a more important role in the coordinated development of the Greater Bay Area. In this development model, which is different from the world's bay area, Shenzhen, which has strong advantages in the field of industrial innovation, has become the key to driving the overall development.

Previously, Tang Jie, the former vice mayor of Shenzhen, had analyzed the path of Shenzhen to drive the Bay Area cities to promote industrial innovation in an interview with the media.

According to his analysis, unlike Japan's lean production model, which simply transfers the production link outward, most of the products produced in Shenzhen are innovative products, which require suppliers to have a certain innovation ability to join. As a result, Shenzhen's technology is constantly changing, which can drive the innovation and upgrading of the entire supplier system.

Some economists have mentioned that Shenzhen's advantage over Silicon Valley is that it has cultivated a Dongguan industrial zone, where "countless kinds of products can be manufactured, and they can be made well, quickly and cheaply".

In the context of the new round of development of the Greater Bay Area, the scale and scope of this model need to be further amplified. In particular, in the face of Jiangsu and other provinces and cities in the Yangtze River Delta catching up, Guangdong enterprises, which were active in the past because of "fighting alone", need to be further twisted into a rope, and thus promote the economic reengineering of the Greater Bay Area and even the entire Guangdong.

And in this process, as Tang Jie said, it will experience wave after wave of decline and wave after wave of rise. The agglomeration of industries and populations will lead to the relocation of low-innovation industries, and a new batch of innovative talents will be gathered, forming a new round of entrepreneurial upsurge in innovative industries, and forming what Schumpeter called "destructive innovation".

At present, Zhuxi may be the core of this round of transformation.

National Business Daily

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