Everybody’s rushing for a Shenzhen address, betting tech investments will pick up in Greater Bay Area
- Demand from tech firms for prime office space in Shenzhen will double to about 1.4 million square metres a year from 2020 to 2022, says JLL
- The IT cluster of Nanshan alone will account for 43 per cent, or 6.24 million square metres, of new office space expected by 2023
Eric Ng runs an IT start-up in Hong Kong but he operates a back-office in Shenzhen’s IT cluster of Nanshan. He pays 12,000 yuan (US$1,793) a month in rent for a 30 square metre office in the almost 20-year-old Keyuanxi Building – 40 per cent more than the going rate in Futian – as he wanted to be in the same neighbourhood as tech giants Tencent and Huawei.
Here Ng employs a staff of six for back-end programming and web development for his food takeaway app called Goforeat, which, he says, caters to nearly 10,000 users in Hong Kong’s Central district.
For Ng, setting up in Nanshan was a no-brainer.
“Nanshan is the centre of IT development in Shenzhen, so it was easy to recruit tech experts,” said the 25-year-old entrepreneur from Zhongshan, Guangdong province.
The salary for a computer programmer in Nanshan is about HK$10,000 per month, 64.8 per cent lower than the HK$28,448 offered in Hong Kong, according to data from recruitment website jobsDB.
