Shanghai tech companies essential to economic development

Technology innovation has been one major highlight of Shanghai's high-quality economic development, embracing approximately 370 newly registered technology companies every day in 2023, according to local officials.

The data was released by Qu Wei, deputy director of the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality, during a press conference on Wednesday.

Shanghai was home to over 24,000 high-tech companies by the end of last year. The value of officially recognized technology contracts reached in the city spiked 21.1 percent year-on-year to 485 billion yuan ($67 billion) in 2023, said Qu.

Shanghai has also stepped up its efforts to nurture new quality productive forces. The added value of strategic emerging industries grew by 6.9 percent year-on-year in 2023, accounting for 24.8 percent of Shanghai's 4.72-trillion-yuan GDP. In specific, the combined industrial value of integrated circuit, biomedicine and artificial intelligence amounted to 1.6 trillion yuan last year, said Qu.

The city's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its annual GDP in 2023, and 10 percent of that expenditure was directed to basic researches. The overall fiscal expenditure for technology development surged 36.7 percent year-on-year to nearly 53 billion yuan, of which 26.5 billion yuan came from the municipal level fiscal budget.

According to the report issued by the World Intellectual Property Organization in late September, the Shanghai-Suzhou cluster ranked fifth among the 100 monitored clusters across the world, ascending one place from the 2022 ranking and hitting a record high. This has also reflected Shanghai's progress in terms of overall technology innovation capability, said Qu.