Hi-Tech Innovation Leads to High-Quality & Coordinated Development

“The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area occupies less than 0.6 percent of China’s territory but creates over 12 percent of the nation’s GDP. This means that the GDP generated on per square meter of the land may be 20 times that of the national average level,” said Zhang Guangnan, a professor at the Guangdong-Hong Kong Macao Development Research Institute of Sun Yatsen University. He further pointed out that different from the other three major bay areas in the world, each of the nine mainland cities plus Hong Kong and Macao in the Greater Bay Area has their own characteristics. The question of how to give full play to their respective advantages has become the key to achieving high-quality and coordinated development in the region.

- ZHOU LIN

Intelligent Manufacturing Plus Industrial Design

Where there is a home, there are “Made in Foshan” products. The output value of industrial companies with annual revenue of more than RMB 20 million in Foshan, an important industrial town in the one-hour commuter circle of the Greater Bay Area, reached RMB 2.33 trillion in 2020. As the number of world first-class designers attracted to Foshan increases, together with practitioners from Hong Kong and Macao, the city’s industrial design has moved to the forefront of the global industry.

In the factory of Guangdong Xinbao Electrical Appliances Holdings Co., Ltd., workers can be seen busily producing local-designed coffee machines on the assembly line. In the company’s showroom, all kinds of Internet celebrity products and small appliances can be seen on display, ranging from drinking cups with an automatic heating function and skin cleansing apparatuses to toasters, grills, yogurt machines, and coffee makers. The British high-end home appliance brand Morphy Richards has reached a long-term strategic cooperation agreement with Xinbao to promote its high-end kitchen appliances in China.

Pan Lihong, deputy director of the president’s office of Xinbao, said, “We have in-depth cooperation with Internet companies such as Xiaomi and NetEase Yanxuan. In addition to this, we have strong independent research and development capabilities and a complete technological innovation system, with nearly 3,300 patents, including nearly 300 invention patents.”