Despite headwinds and rising complexities in the global market, Shanghai's Pudong New Area has managed to sustain economic growth thanks to continued efforts to open-up its market and optimize the economic structure, said local officials and company executives.

Positioned as a pioneer of China's socialist modernization, Pudong has seen its GDP grow by 5.8 percent in the first half of the year, while the city's average was 5.1 percent. The value of foreign investment in Pudong has surged by 36.1 percent on a yearly basis. A total of 18,300 companies were newly registered, up 28.1 percent year-on-year, according to Li Zheng, Pudong's Party secretary.

Li disclosed the data during a news conference on Wednesday, the first of its kind to wrap up Shanghai's achievements during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25).

Last year, Pudong saw the value of five major economic indicators standing above 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion), including GDP, output generated by industrial companies with a minimum 20 million yuan of annual sales, turnover made by service companies with a minimum 20 million yuan of annual sales, export and import of goods, and online sales, he said.

It should be noted that knowledge-intensive industries have played bigger roles in Pudong's economic development, said Li. Information transmission, software and information technology service companies contributed 10.3 percent of the area's GDP last year, up 2.1 percentage points from that in 2020. Emerging industries, such as integrated circuit and biomedicine, accounted for 53.6 percent of Pudong's industrial output last year, the ratio of which was 48.4 percent in 2020.

A complete IC value chain has been formed in Pudong, said Wu Jincheng, government head of Pudong New Area. The area's IC industrial value reached 294.7 billion yuan in 2024, taking up 75 percent of Shanghai's total and 20 percent of the country's total. Up to 800 IC companies have set up operations in Pudong, hiring nearly 200,000 employees.

With coordinated development regarding computing, model algorithm, software and hardware, Pudong-based artificial intelligence companies saw their combined industrial value reaching 163.7 billion yuan in 2024, accounting for 40 percent of the city's total, said Wu.

According to Dai Zhong, chairman of Lianren Digital Health, the company has experienced the maturity of various ecosystems in Pudong. The company has already collected, processed and managed paramount data over the past few years. AI models can thus thrive on the data provided by similar healthcare companies in Pudong.

Meanwhile, Lianren can provide masked data to biomedicine companies, helping them to speed up the R&D of new drugs, said Dai.

Ongoing two-way opening-up is another major driving force in Pudong's economic growth. Since 2021, Pudong has utilized $43.64 billion foreign investment. A total of 129 multinational companies have set up their regional headquarters in the area in the past five years. Many industry firsts, such as China's first wholly foreign-owned securities brokerage and the country's first mechanism for cross-border data flow, have been established in Pudong.

In late July, leading semiconductor company Infineon held the groundbreaking ceremony for its customized distribution center in Pudong, which will be the company's largest single project of its kind globally.

Located in China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, which is located partly in Pudong, Infineon has seen its business capacity expanding and operation efficiency improving over the past decade. This has largely facilitated the company's rapid development in China, said David Poon, president of Infineon Greater China.

Domestic companies are also bullish on Pudong's future, which can be seen by the 14.2 percent average annual growth in terms of investment from the private sector in the past five years.

Six major frontier projects just landed in Lin-gang Special Area on Tuesday, when this part of the Shanghai FTZ celebrated its sixth anniversary.

With a combined investment value exceeding 40 billion yuan, the six projects include the three-dimensional chip integration project of SJ Semiconductor (Jiangyin) Corp, which can strengthen Lin-gang's competitiveness in high-end advanced IC packaging.

shijing@chinadaily.com.cn