GDP of Zhengzhou City in China Surpass $188.6 Billion in 2023

Zhengzhou city in Central China’s Henan province is emerging as another business hub with the construction of a modern national centre last year, fulfilling the city’s commitment to high-quality development.

Official statistics showed that the city’s GDP increased by 7.4% year-on-year to surpass $188.6 billion in 2023 and its industrial activity added value above the designated size grew by 12.8%, ranking first among nine national centre cities across China.

Total retail sales of consumer goods and fixed asset investment in Zhengzhou were up 7.7% and 6.8%, respectively. Also, the city’s proportion of spending on research and development to GDP has outperformed the national average for two consecutive years.

According to an official report, 2024 is crucial for Zhengzhou to construct a modern national centre as it will promote the establishment of modern industrial systems, build one of China’s first demonstration zones for new industrialisation and foster new quality productive forces.

Zhengzhou announced a three-year action in 2023 to better develop advanced manufacturing, and to promote 20 key industry chains and managed to sign 238 large industrial projects, with a total contract value exceeding $40 billion.

Moreover, the number of specialised and sophisticated businesses that produce novel and unique products reached 3,554 in the city, including 122 ‘little giant’ companies with cutting-edge technologies. It also produced 830,000 vehicles, up 61.7% year-on-year, of which 316,000 were new energy vehicles (NEVs).

This year, leading enterprises such as China Electrical Equipment, China Railway Engineering Equipment, Zhengzhou Coal Mining Machinery Group and Weihua Group, Zhengzhou will expand the scale of its equipment manufacturing industrial cluster and plans to sign at least five national intelligent manufacturing projects.

It also plans to attach greater importance to electronic information, striving to increase the industry’s output value by more than 5%, with the scale of the industrial cluster reaching $96.72 billion.

The city aims to produce more than 700,000 NEVs by the end of this year, which is expected to help increase the output value of the automobile industry by 60%, and will optimise the layout of algorithms, computing power and big data centres, accelerate the construction of such projects as a new national internet exchange centre and the Zhengzhou artificial intelligence computing centre.

Reliance in S &T

More efforts will be made by the city government to achieve self-reliance in science and technology, and enhance independent innovation capability, according to the work report.

In 2023, Zhengzhou finished building a ‘quantum valley,’ which has attracted a series of related projects and labs. It added four new national laboratories and five provincial ones, bringing the total number of these two types of lab up to 14 and 12 respectively.

China plans to build the supercomputing internet by the end of 2025 to connect powerful computers across the nation and tap into their joint power to promote innovation and socioeconomic growth.

Zhengzhou also finished establishing an Air Silk Road in 2023, linking it with Cambodia and other ASEAN countries. It opened 15 related passenger routes, which handled more than 25 million passengers in 2023, and nine cargo routes, with a combined handling capacity of 608,000 metric tons.

The city will promote high-level opening-up and strengthen the leading role of its free trade zone this year and the number of newly registered companies in the zone is expected to reach 15,000, the report said.