Last year’s fifth Yangtze River Delta Sci-Tech Fair attracted numerous cooperation agreements, facilitating intra-circle development within the region.
In recent years, Jiading District has been focusing on integrated development and high-quality growth, while fostering cooperation with neighboring cities to bring out complementary advantages in innovation chains.
This has led to the acceleration of integration and coordination of industrial chains, as well as promotion of exchange and sharing of supply chains, thereby maximizing innovation and development of the surrounding area and promoting growth of the Yangtze River Delta region.
For example, the research and development results from Schaeffler Shanghai R&D Center are put into production at Schaeffler’s Taicang Plant. The technical engineers from Shanghai frequently travel to Schaeffler’s Suzhou factory for business purposes, and employees from Suzhou regularly “check-in” to work in Shanghai.
“The circulation of talent is key to the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, and is also an advantage for the intra-circle development of regional industries,” said Zhang Yilin, chief executive officer of Schaeffler China.
Jiading in Shanghai has been working closely with other regions in the Yangtze River Delta area, such as Kunshan and Taicang in Jiangsu Province, to achieve deeper integration of industrial development. This has strengthened the confidence of companies in their efforts to develop and grow their businesses in the Yangtze River Delta region.
The intra-circle development has enabled companies to expand their geographical footprint.
Schaeffler has established its regional headquarters and R&D center in Jiading and currently operates eight factories in locations including Taicang, Suzhou, and Nanjing in the Yangtze River Delta region.
While the expansion project for Schaeffler China’s regional headquarters and R&D center in Jiading is expected to be operational soon, their new-energy vehicle parts manufacturing base in Taicang is also expected to become operational later this year.
According to Zhang, since the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta region was elevated to a national strategy in China, the region has become the most active, open and innovative area in terms of economic development.
Schaeffler has already opened over 40 bus routes that cross regions of Shanghai, and Taicang and Kunshan in Jiangsu Province.
Schaeffler’s case offers just a glimpse into the rapid intra-circle development in the Yangtze River Delta region. Jiading is targeting the construction of several world-class industrial clusters, focusing on the automotive “new four modernizations” (electrification, IoT, intellectualization and sharing), automotive chips, high-performance medical equipment and precision medical industries.
The district is also implementing actions to strengthen and consolidate these industry chains, and working to align its policies and plans with neighboring regions.
It has initiated the “Jia-Kun-Tai” (referring to Jiading, Kunshan and Taicang) industry coordinated development plan, which supports leading enterprises in driving integration and innovation among large, medium, and small-sized enterprises.