Heze driven by innovative forces

Heze, a city in East China's Shandong province, has put more focus on fostering new growth drivers and promoting its innovation-driven development strategy to serve its high-quality development, local officials said.

According to the city's government work report in 2023, Heze's economy has made steady progress and its key industries have developed vigorously in the past year. It is estimated that the city's gross domestic product hit 425 billion yuan ($62.72 billion) at the end of 2022, an increase of 4.6 percent from the previous year.

Biomedicine industry has become one of the key leading industries in Heze. Official data showed that the main business revenue of its biomedicine industry increased by 20 percent year-on-year in 2022.

The Heze Modern Medical Port is designed as a first-class international and domestic biomedical industrial park with its high-quality facilities and sci-tech resources. Up to now, agreements for 44 projects have been signed in the park, with a total contract investment of nearly 14 billion yuan.

Shandong Ruiying Pharmaceutical Group, a leading biomedicine enterprise in Heze, developed the world's first intelligent manufacturing sharing platform for the whole pharmaceutical industry chain, which can reduce the industrialization cycle of new drugs by 90 percent and cut production costs by two-thirds.

Investment in sic-tech research and development has also continued to increase. Last year, the city's fiscal expenditures on science and technology increased by 84 percent, compared with 2021 figures. Eight "little giant enterprises", or specialized and sophisticated technology enterprises producing unique and novel products have been established.

With local government's support, the Shandong Chengwu Yixin Environmental Technology Co was rated as a national level "little giant enterprise". The company owns a number of independent intellectual property rights in new technologies and new materials fields. Its industrial mass production project of boron isotope series has shown promising results, and after the project is put into use, the annual sales revenue is expected to reach 3.5 billion yuan.

Heze also sets ambitious goals for high-quality development in 2023. According to the government work report, the city's GDP is expected to increase by about 5.5 percent and the added value of industries above designated size to rise by about 6 percent.