Shenzhen to shift from speed to quality in new five-year plan

Biotechnology, the internet and new energies - the pillar industries in Shenzhen's new five-year plan announced yesterday - are expected to contribute a total of up to 650 billion yuan (HK$766.5 billion) per year to the city's economy by 2015.

Authorities expect the city's gross domestic product to rise by 10 per cent a year and reach 1 trillion yuan in 2011 and 1.5 trillion yuan - the size of Hong Kong's GDP last year - in 2015. Last year, Shenzhen's economy grew 12 per cent, with a GDP of 950 billion yuan.

Vice-mayor Tang Jie told the Shenzhen Communist Party Committee's annual conference that it would no longer compete with other mainland cities for labour-intensive, export-driven industries and would focus instead on low-carbon development.

'After 30 years of economic development, Shenzhen already has solid economic strength and will shift its emphasis from speed to quality,' Tang said.

'Resources [of the city] are limited, but innovation is infinite. Shenzhen's innovation mechanism will mainly be led by individual enterprises, which will combine production, learning and research.'

In its five-year plan, Shenzhen vows to become China's key city for information technology and environmentally friendly energy. Its leaders want their city to be a global bio-industrial and logistics centre, and expect strong support from Beijing, which plans huge investments in technology to make the mainland a science powerhouse by 2020.

Although outsiders' knowledge of the pillar industries is restricted to big names such as BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute), Tencent, Huawei Technologies and electric-vehicle maker BYD, the city identified 745 key companies in biotechnology, 276 in the internet and 50 in new energies.