Ningbo, a coastal city in East China’s Zhejiang province, is expected to join the nation’s “1 trillion yuan ($147.8 billion) club”, with its GDP surpassing 1 trillion yuan in 2018.

The city will become the nation’s 15th city to join the club, backed by its economic development driven by science, technology and industrial innovation, according to a meeting hosted by the Ningbo municipal government on Tuesday.

In 2018 the city’s 197 key construction projects, with a combined investment of 504.5 billion yuan, realized an actual investment of 100.8 billion yuan, far exceeding previous targets.

It also recorded a total of 1,976 newly registered startups, among which 1,039 are high-tech, ranking first in the province in terms of numbers.

To further facilitate cross-border trade, the city’s ports adopted a number of measures, such as paperless approval for imported goods, and the green channel for goods imported from or exported to the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC).

These measures helped shorten customs clearance times by 64 percent, 9.8 percentage points higher than the national average.

Statistics released by Ningbo Customs show that in 2018, Ningbo’s foreign trade reached 857.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year rise of 12.9 percent.

Fourteen cities in China – Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Tianjin, Suzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Qingdao, Wuxi and Changsha – have already joined the “1 trillion yuan club”.

Among these cities, Shanghai became the first city to have its GDP break 3 trillion yuan in 2017, while Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou saw their GDP cross the 2-trillion-yuan benchmark.