Major goals announced for transforming traditional industries

Under the guidance of the Central Economic Work Conference, a recent meeting on national industrial and information-technology work has specified major goals for 2024, including speeding up the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, and cementing the leading position of advantageous industries.

In Wucheng county of Dezhou, Shangdong province, the drive to further cement local advantageous industries and facilitate product upgrade is in full swing.

The Wucheng government said it is encouraging local companies to spare no efforts to further improve product quality and upgrade product offerings through a variety of innovative efforts, such as setting up awards for quality enhancement, promoting enterprise standardization, and speeding up product upgrading.

The local government has compiled and publicly released the first national index for the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) industry, a sector in which the Wucheng county enjoys a comparative advantage nationwide.

Wucheng Huaneng Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastic Group Co Ltd, for example, has witnessed its professional qualification for contracting fire protection engineering upgraded from level II to I, which means it is now qualified to carry out all kinds of fire protection engineering works in China.

The company is the first in the county to obtain such a qualification, bringing the local HVAC industry to a new level.

The HVAC industry has grown into one of Wucheng's strengths, making it famous as the HVAC industrial hub in Northern China. Currently, the county's products, such as fans, ducts, coils and fire dampers, account for over 50 percent of the national market share, according to the local government.

The tone-setting Central Economic Work Conference, which was held in December, has put promoting technological innovation to support the development of a modern industrial system at the top of the economic agenda for the next year.

According to Liang Jing, a research fellow at the Bank of China Research Institute, China is at a pivotal stage of transitioning from traditional factors to technology, data and other new productive factors, which entails the improvement of total-factor productivity through strengthening independence in research and development ability.

The formation of new productivity boosters, through either prompting sci-tech innovation or transforming traditional industrial sectors, will become a vital driving force in China's economic growth next year and high-quality industrial development in the future, Yang Weiyong, an associate professor of economics at the University of International Business and Economics, agreed with Liang, stressing that the innovation capability of the nation lies in numerous individual companies and local governments at grassroots levels.

Joint efforts made by local governments at all levels and vast industrial firms across the country, no matter how small they are, will make a big difference in further enhancing the nation's manufacturing prowess and its innovation capability.

zhuangqiange@chinadaily.com.cn