Zhongguancun's advances since China's reform and opening up
In the 40 years since China's reform and opening up, Zhongguancun has developed from the original "Electronics Street" to a national independent innovation demonstration zone, and has made remarkable achievements in promoting the development of China's high-tech industry.
In the early 1980s, a group of scientific and technical personnel resigned from academic institutions and established private high-tech enterprises in Zhongguancun. In 2009, the State Council approved the construction of the Zhongguancun National Demonstration Zone. A large number of major scientific achievements such as a laser phototypesetting system, supercomputers, integrated circuit devices, high-speed rail operation control mechanisms, green Dip-pen nanolithography, 5G mobile communication, graphene material preparation, liquid metal additive manufacturing, innovative drugs and medical devices were born here. Especially in the fields of mobile Internet, e-commerce, computer vision, artificial intelligence chips, driverless vehicles, high-definition and other fields, Zhongguancun enterprises have been in the forefront of the international market.
As a demonstration zone, Zhongguancun is noted for advanced technology at an international level and has established a cutting-edge technology innovation center. According to Dou Yanli, the joint secretary of the Zhongguancun Frontier Technology and Industry Service Alliance, the Innovation Center provides priority policy support and system services for frontier enterprises in investment and financing, market linkage, intellectual property, and publicity service. "One of the criteria for us to select cutting-edge technology companies is that they should have major disruptive original core technologies. Like Zhongke Cambricon, the company was established in March 2016. It released a new product this year and has made a great breakthrough in the design of professional processor chips. Now, the company is already a unicorn company with a listing plan," said Dou.
BOE Technology Group Co LTD, located in Zhongguancun Science Park, is gradually occupying the liquid crystal display market. In 2017, BOE's LCD shipments accounted for 25 percent of the world's volume and its shipments compared to other suppliers ranked first globally. The company has achieved a number of new patent applications, and its gross profit rate ranked first in the world for the fourth consecutive year. Many well-known Chinese technology companies such as Lenovo, Founder, Ziguang and SMIC were, like BOE, born in Zhongguancun. Especially in recent years, several new generation technology enterprises such as Jingdong, Xiaomi, Qihoo 360, Didi, Sense Time and Horizon have risen rapidly and emerged in international markets.
Zhongguancun not only insists on gathering talents from different countries but also insists on personnel training, which has become its core competitiveness. In 2015, the Beijing Big Data Research Institute was established at Peking University. E Veinan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, and Princeton University tenured professor, said, "In the field of big data, talents enjoy good sales. The first problem we solved was to achieve institutional innovation. The second task of Big Data Research Institute is to establish an effective industry-university-research mechanism in the field of big data."
Zhongguancun has gradually formed a new generation of information technology, biomedicine and big health, intelligent manufacturing and new materials, energy conservation and environmental protection, modern transportation, emerging services and six other industrial clusters.
Among them, the new-generation information technology industry has a value of more than 2 trillion yuan, and the market share of big data and information security ranks first in China. IC design revenue accounts for about one-third of the country's total. In 2017, the total revenue of Zhongguancun enterprises was 5.3 trillion yuan, and total profit reached 467.08 billion yuan. From January to May 2018, the total revenue of Zhongguancun enterprises reached 1.9 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.3 percent over that time period last year.
