Guangzhou offers lots of carrots to win over international biotech players in race to catch up with Beijing and Shanghai
- Huge Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City will foster high-tech industrial clusters
- GE Healthcare of the US is building its first Asia biotech campus there
The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou thinks it has found the formula to catch up with Beijing and the eastern cities of Shanghai and Suzhou in the development of novel drugs: incentives to win over big international players.
Government incentives have attracted investment from such companies as GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of American conglomerate General Electric that focuses on medical imaging and diagnostics equipment and bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies.
GE is building its first Asia biotech campus – covering 350,000 square metres and requiring US$800 million of investment – in the Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, some 35 kilometres northeast of downtown Guangzhou.
The “city” – a joint development project between Guangdong and Singapore in an area one-ninth the land area of Hong Kong – aims to house half a million people and foster high-tech industrial clusters in the high-growth emerging fields of information technology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, clean energy and advance industrial materials.
GE will join the Guangzhou government and biotech industry players to fund the construction of several “KUBio” modular bio-pharmaceutical factories, which the healthcare giant says will shorten the completion time from 30 months to 18 months, cut construction cost by half, and quicken drugs commercialisation.