Shanghai makes moves to equip 'new cities' with more facilities

Editor's Notes:

Shanghai, a well-established destination for investment from home and abroad, is confident to ride the waves of a rising city to attract more quality investment with better policies and services.

Shanghai's ambitious plan to build five "new cities" in suburban areas will be accelerated as more facilities with key functions are going to be put into use soon, making the places better equipped for investment.

According to a new implementation plan, the five "new cities" – in Jiading, Qingpu, Songjiang and Fengxian districts as well as Nanhui in the Pudong New Area – will focus on introducing enterprise headquarters, enhancing innovative research and development, gathering various resources, and improving public services.

For instance, Fudan University is setting up an integrated innovation center in Qingpu as a key project in the suburban district.

Innovative institutes of integrated circuits and micro- and nano-electronics, computing and intelligence, biomedical engineering, intelligent robotics and advanced manufacturing will be established in the center, according to Wu Libo, director of the development and planning office of Fudan University.

A number of new engineering research platforms will also be laid out to study cutting-edge technologies in key fields such as communication and information engineering, aerospace, and complex systems engineering.

The center's establishment in Qingpu will help fill the gap in the district's higher education resources, and it can also give full play to Fudan's Qingpu Campus in supporting the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta region.

TCL Electronics Holdings, meanwhile, revealed a new two-phase project in Qingpu with a total investment of about 3 billion yuan (US$446.9 million). It plans to build a production and R&D cluster of electronic information and semiconductor materials, which will gather and support upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chains of TCL Technology and TCL Industries.

TCL will set up a new 102.8-mu (17-acre) campus with an investment of 1 billion yuan in the first phase, the company revealed.

Also, the China Railway No. 4 Engineering Group plans to set up its headquarters in the central business district of Qingpu New City, hoping to serve as a seedbed for high-quality development.

According to its plan, the group will move its investment and development center, R&D center and engineering firms into the headquarters, and also set up a financial management unit, an industrial incubation center and a management consulting center.

The new headquarters is expected to introduce 800 employees from the group's current base and recruit 200 local high-tech talents within five years, while achieving a total operating revenue of 10 billion yuan.