Shanghai outlines vision for smarter, more global services through 2030

The service industry, which is already an important growth engine for Shanghai, should become more digitalized, standardized, integrated and international to further improve the city's economic resilience and its capacity to allocate service resources worldwide.

These goals are included in the city's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) for the service industry, which was released on Monday. The plan specified that the average annual growth rate of value added in the service industry will be at least 5.5 percent by 2030, with labor productivity exceeding 450,000 yuan ($66,503) per capita.

One key highlight of the plan is its forward-looking roadmap for emerging service sectors, covering intelligent technologies, life sciences and healthcare, and the experience economy, according to Liu Jian, director of Shanghai Municipal Development & Reform Commission.

Specifically, Shanghai aims to deepen the development of artificial intelligence software technology and services, intelligent driving, targeted drugs, brain-computer interfaces, as well as new experience economy services such as immersive cultural tourism and IP consumption, he said.

Industrial services are also a key focus in the next five years, as the city aims to expand application scenarios, strengthen service industrial chains and build larger industrial clusters, according to Ge Dongbo, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization.

The plan promotes service-oriented manufacturing within sectors like intelligent terminals and intelligent connected new energy vehicles. To support this, large AI models will be deeply embedded into industries to create a series of typical application scenarios for service-oriented manufacturing, said Ge.

Furthermore, Shanghai will accelerate the development of a productive service industry driven by deeper AI integration. Therefore, the supply of models, computing power and corpus data should be optimized amid the maturity of industrial design, supply chain management, quality inspection, and equipment operation and maintenance industries, according to the new plan.

Meanwhile, key industries such as electronic information and high-end equipment will feature one-stop procurement services, as well as optimized flexible production and capacity trading. This will help manufacturing enterprises better explore the overseas markets, said the plan.

To date, Shanghai has cultivated 21 national-level industrial design centers and 191 municipal-level design innovation centers. The city has fostered two national-level pilot platforms and four municipal-level pilot platforms. Key industrial internet platforms have served over 2.3 million customers.

To further expand service consumption, Shanghai will formulate and introduce a number of locally established benchmark service standards in the next five years.

To enrich the supply of service consumption, Shanghai will cultivate health and medical service brands, strengthen the foundation for rehabilitation and traditional Chinese medicine services, and expand the products and consumption scenarios for silver economy. Domestic service industry will be more professional, standardized and regulated, according to Liu Min, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce.

In 2025, Shanghai announced its first batch of 16 domestic service enterprises with an employee-based management model. Based on this, Shanghai aims to cultivate two to three leading domestic service providers featuring larger market influence, well-established brands and complete service systems during the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period.

Different districts in the city will have their respective focuses, with Huangpu district featuring entertainment, Xuhui highlighting gaming and animation, Jing'an emphasizing fashion debuts and Songjiang's stress on film and television industry.

In 2025, the total added value of Shanghai's service industry reached 4.5 trillion yuan, accounting for 79.3 percent of the city's GDP. Investment in the service sector represented over 80 percent of total fixed-asset investment. Utilized foreign capital in the service industry accounted for more than 90 percent of actual foreign capital received.

In addition, the number of large-scale events with over 1,000 participants held in Shanghai last year increased 34 percent on a yearly basis. The total number of visitors and tourists that the city received in 2025 increased by 21 percent year-on-year, with inbound tourists surging by nearly 40 percent.