Over the past years, Changsha has seen great development in industries and won such titles as the “capital of construction machinery” and “city strong on manufacturing”.

In 2022, the construction sites of Changsha’s districts, counties (county-level cities) and industrial parks were buzzing with machinery.

By the end of November 2022, the annual investment completion rate of 13 major industrial projects in Changsha had reached 109 percent.

According to the Research Report on the Top 100 Advanced Manufacturing Cities (2022) issued by CCID Consulting, Changsha ranked 8th nationwide and 1st in central and western regions.

The implementation of major industrial projects on both sides of the Xiangjiang River has enabled Changsha to take a strong step towards high-quality development in developing itself into a national key hub of advanced manufacturing.

Creating new benchmarks for advanced energy storage industry

In the Work Plan of Changsha for Promoting the “Five Ten Major Projects” in 2022, 4 of the 10 major leading industrial projects belong to the advanced energy storage material industry.

In the north of Changsha, Wangcheng Economic and Technological Development Zone has taken the lead in Hunan Province in introducing the Desay Energy Storage Cell Project with an investment of 10 billion yuan as a landmark of Changsha’s major projects. It has created a new speed to achieve project signing and commencement within 20 days.

Hunan Desay Battery Co., Ltd. has a total investment of 7.5 billion yuan in fixed assets, with a planning area of 863 mu (about 57.53 hectares) and a total planned production capacity of 20 GWh. It will be completed in two phases and is expected to achieve an annual output value of 12 billion yuan after full production.

Jinchi Energy Materials Co., Ltd., located in Changyuan Lico Tongguan Base in Wangcheng, has been focusing on the research and production of high-efficiency 
battery materials for many years.

As a high-tech enterprise, the company has followed the international development trend to carry out research and development of new energy materials, with complete independent intellectual property rights and advanced laboratory and pilot platform. Its technology level has reached the international advanced level, and its comprehensive competitiveness has been at the forefront of the industry.

However, in summer, it also faced some problems in production and operation in terms of securing production factors, such as unstable water supply in the industrial park due to the falling water level of the Xiangjiang River in the drought and insufficient labor affected by the epidemic.

When an enterprise faces a problem, the industrial park will respond as soon as possible.

From July 12 to July 13, 2022, the leading group of the industrial park and the heads of various departments visited the enterprises, and conducted on-site scheduling  to solve problems like steam and water supply.

In order to strengthen the water supply capacity of Tongguan Waterworks, during the dry period of the Xiangjiang River in summer, the industrial park coordinated the use of floating boats to set up additional water intake pumps in the center of the Xiangjiang River to ensure the normal water intake production of Tongguan Waterworks.

Furthermore, during the peak water consumption period in summer, the industrial park restricted and adjusted the water intake time for sanitation and greening to concentrate on the morning and night, so that enterprises can operate smoothly during regular working hours.

In March 2022, the park held a job fair to attract local talent from surrounding towns, where over 50 enterprises in the industrial park like Jinchi Energy actively participated. On the same day, more than 2,000 job seekers were attracted, of whom nearly 500 reached employment intentions, greatly alleviating the problem of “labour difficulties” for enterprises.

The flourishing development of the advanced energy storage industry cannot be achieved without the policy support of Changsha.

In September 2022, the General Office of Changsha Municipal People’s Government issued the Implementation Opinions on Supporting the Development of 
Advanced Energy Storage Materials Industry (hereinafter referred to as the Implementation Opinions).

According to the Implementation Opinions, by 2026, the total scale of industrial clusters will have exceed 500 billion yuan, and 2 or 3 advantageous industrial clusters will have been built, with each worth 100 billion yuan or more. The power battery capacity and the energy storage battery capacity will have reached 100GWh respectively, and the output of new energy vehicles will have amounted to 1 million. Moreover, 15 advanced energy-storage materials industry enterprises with each worth 5 billion yuan will have been cultivated, as well as 10 enterprises with each worth 10 billion yuan, 1 enterprise worth 50 billion yuan, and 10 new national-level “little giant” enterprises.

Focusing on emerging advantageous bio-industry chains

The factory of Truking SUT Biotechnology (Changsha) Co., Ltd., a holding subsidiary of Truking Technology situated in Ningxiang of Changsha, was officially put into operation in May 2022.
In order to ensure timely and stable delivery of large orders to customers in the future, a second phase of single-use consumables manufacturing workshop is planned to be built at the Truking Technology headquarters campus, which is expected to cover a usable area of 20,000 square meters.

“The large-scale customized manufacturing poses a great challenge to the product quality uniformity, and the traditional manufacturing mode will face a great dilemma of standardized management.” Chen Xin, general manager of Truking SUT Biotechnology (Changsha) Co., Ltd., said that their team started research and development two years ago to automate the flexible production line in order to cope with the demand for large quantities of orders in the future market and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.

“After the completion of the second phase of the factory, a closed loop of single-use process consumables will be formed from raw material development and production to application system production and manufacturing, which is more conducive to building a biopharmaceutical industry ecosystem,” Chen said.

In recent years, Changsha has actively promoted the construction of the emerging and advantageous industrial chain “Truking Bio-pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Industrial Chain”. Based on this, Ningxiang Economic and Technological Development Zone has supported Truking Technology to seize the window period of industrial development and build the industrial cluster of bio-pharmaceutical and life sciences. On October 19, 2022, it signed a cooperation framework agreement with Truking Technology on the construction of this industrial chain to carry out all-round and multi-level cooperation.

At the construction site of the Truking Technology Polymer Material Industrial Park, the workers have been working in an orderly manner to speed up the construction. The industrial park will focus on the localization of core components in the field of pharmaceutical equipment, realize intelligent and digital production, which is expected to form a bio-pharmaceutical industrial cluster with an output value of more than 100 billion yuan.

In Ningxiang Economic and Technological Development Zone, the biomedical and life science industry chain with Truking Technology as the “chain leader” has been built. Led by the “chain leader”, enterprises of all sizes complement each other and are committed to making breakthroughs in a number of “bottleneck” technologies.

The industrial chain mainly focuses on the localization of core components in the field of pharmaceutical equipment, realizing intellectualization and digitalization, accelerating the “supplying and strengthening of the chain”, and “building and extending the chain” in the field of life science like biomedical consumables, CDMO platform and antibodies.

In order to promote the development of biomedicine and life science industries in many ways, and strive to implement the strategy of “Strengthening the Provincial Capital”, the People’s Government of Ningxiang issued 7 articles with a total of 20 measures in September 2022 to comprehensively improve the independent innovation ability and core competitiveness of strategic emerging industries in Ningxiang, and build a national key hub of advanced manufacturing.

Meanwhile, Changsha has issued policies and measures to support the priority development of the bio-pharmaceutical industry, closely focusing on the layout of the bio-pharmaceutical industry chain, which has benefited the equipment manufacturing and biological diagnosis enterprises in the upstream of the bio-pharmaceutical industry.

At present, Changsha has gathered a number of bio-pharmaceutical listed companies like Truking Technology, Sansure Biotech and Sinocare Biology, which have seen continuous growth. The development of the industrial chain under the “leading” effect has achieved steady progress.

Seizing new opportunities in computing

In the era of digital economy, computing power is a new productivity and an important engine to drive high-quality economic development.

On November 4, 2022, the “World Computing - Changsha Intelligent Valley” in the Xiangjiang New Area was established, which is the first 5A level intelligent computing center in Changsha. It complements other types of computing power centers, making the layout of computing power in Changsha vividly portrayed.

As the core area of the advanced computing industry cluster, the “World Computing - Changsha Intelligent Valley” covers an area of 913 mu (about 60.87 hectares) and a building area of 2.73 million square meters, with a total investment of 18 billion yuan.

Currently, the construction of the project’s high-tech digital research center has been basically completed and is undergoing acceptance and exhibition decoration work, and is expected to be fully open in January 2023. The E12 plot in the first area is under construction and planned to be completed and delivered in December 2023. Earthwork has commenced in Areas 2 and 3, and the overall construction is expected to be completed in 2025.

The “World Computing - Changsha Intelligent Valley” focuses on the four core elements of computing power, algorithm, data, and AIOT in the advanced computing field. Taking computing power as an example, the Intelligent Valley relies on the AI innovation center and introduces Huawei and Sugon, two leading enterprises in the field of computing power, as well as their ecological enterprises.

In terms of AIOT, the Intelligent Valley has planned a huge number of scenarios, and released over 600 smart scenarios of 18 categories in the industrial park to build a win-win situation with ecological enterprises, aiming to gather 20,000 ecological enterprises through a huge number of scenarios.

“Currently, 136 enterprises are under negotiation in terms of investment promotion, and a total of 75 leading enterprises intend to settle here. 12 enterprises such as Chinasoft International have signed agreements.” Wang Juan, the project leader of the Intelligent Valley Business Unit of Changsha Software Park, said that six major industrial platforms will also be introduced, including Peking University Institute of Computing and Digital Economy and Xiangjiang Laboratory.

In the future, the “World Computing - Changsha Intelligent Valley” will gather 20 leading enterprises, 50 headquarters enterprises, 1,500 small and medium-sized enterprises, with 80,000 industrial employees. It will endeavor to develop itself into an advanced computing city.

On the morning of December 20, 2022, China Telecom Tianyi Cloud Central and Southern Digital Industrial Park, the largest new digital infrastructure project in Hunan, saw the capping of the main structure of the final building during the first section of Phase I officially completed, which marked a new stage of the overall construction.

The project has a total investment of 12 billion yuan, with a planning area of about 300 mu (20 hectares), including a net area of 117.3 mu (7.82 hectares) for Phase I, which can accommodate 21,100 racks and 300,000 servers. A total of five monolithic buildings are currently under construction, including two data centers, one power center as well as one operation and maintenance center.

“The project is planned to be put into use in August this year.” Wang Wei, senior director of the Cloud Network Infrastructure Office of China Telecom Hunan Corporation, said that with the help of the authorities, the project has rapidly completed the preliminary work of project registration, land transfer, land use planning, construction permit and so on since the signing of the investment promotion contract.

“After the completion of the industrial park, intelligent management will be implemented, and the operation and maintenance personnel will be less than 100.” Wang Wei said that after the completion and operation of the industrial park, it will become the super-large data center and computing center with the highest network level, the largest export broadband and the strongest cloud computing capability in Hunan Province.

According to the official statistics, the annual investment completion rate of 1,766 major projects in Changsha reached 124 percent in 2022, and 80 new projects of “Fortune Global 500 enterprises, China’s top 500 enterprises and China’s top 500 private enterprises” were introduced, with an increase of 20.9 percent.

In the future, the completion of major leading projects will not only drive the upstream and downstream development of related industries, but also help cultivate five future industries. Efforts will be made to promote the establishment of a modern industrial system and boost high-quality industrial development.