Economy and Business

'Marvelous City' meeting in Suzhou seeks more co-op with Shanghai

By Shi Jing (China Daily Shanghai Bureau)
Updated: 2010-06-23 19:43

SHANGHAI: A promotion conference with the theme of "Marvelous City" held by Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) took place in Shanghai on Monday, seeking further communication and cooperation between SIP and Shanghai.

Supported by Singaporean Consulate-General in Shanghai, the conference received consulates from 20 countries including United States, Canada and Japan as well as more than 300 representatives from enterprises including some World 500 companies like Hitachi, Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth and HSBC.

On the conference, SIP signed cooperation agreements with over 20 high-tech, finance and logistics companies from Shanghai, such as Sompo Japan Insurance and Wyeth, making it another win-win demonstration of exchanges within the Yangtze River Delta.

Mr Yang Zhiping, Chairman of SIP Administrative Committee gave the theme report, expressing their expectations to have all-round cooperation with Shanghai in the five areas, namely emerging industries, science and technology innovation industry, finance service industry, tourism and culture industry as well as logistics and expositions industry.

Suzhou Industrial Park has made out clear plans to facilitate the cooperation with Shanghai. In terms of the emerging industries, SIP has particularly set up an industrial planning of, attaching much importance to the five industries including bio-pharmaceutical, nano-optoelectronics, new energy, converged communication, software and animation, ecological and environmental protection.

Among the five emerging industries, nano-tech industry is taken as the strategic emerging industry and is supported by Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics, China Academy of Sciences. A total of 10 billion yuan will be invested in the industry in the next five years to drive a public investment amounting to 50 billion yuan related to the Nano-tech industry.

Science and technology innovation is another industry that Suzhou Industrial Park is seeking cooperation with its neighbor city Shanghai. After 16 years' development, SIP has established a number of function parks with a total area of three million square meters, Suzhou International Science Park for example, and 10 international public cooperation platforms such as Cold Spring Harbor Asia conferences.

Apart from bridging China and the world, Expo 2010 Shanghai also provides a good opportunity for SIP to join with Shanghai and to develop itself into an internationalized "marvelous city" in return, according to Mr Ma Minglong.

By taking the example of Shanghai's tourism layout of Pudong and Puxi Districts, Suzhou Industrial Park, as the only National Business Tourism Demonstration Zone in China, has successfully turned the Jinji Lake and Yangcheng Lake area into well-known tourism destination.

Meanwhile, 31 brand hotels have been introduced into the Park. A number of brand projects such as Asia's largest bookstore Suzhou Phoenix Book City have seen great success here.

As the neighbor of Shanghai, Suzhou has benefited much from the neighbor. As the most important marine and air hub in Asia, Shanghai bears the largest port of throughput with world-class logistics. SIP has cooperated with Shanghai entity port to establish a virtual port with air-sea-land "three-in-one" transfer mode.

According to Mr Ma Minglong, these cooperative areas between SIP and Shanghai will open up a very important channel for SIP to realize its aim of being "marvelous city".