Beijing E-Town highlighted by innovative development

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

By Yuan Xinwen, Du Shangze, Yu Jinxing, People's Daily

With just 0.35 percent of Beijing's land, Beijing E-Town generates nearly 30 percent of the city's industrial added value. It is home to four booming hundred-billion-yuan ($13.72 billion) industrial clusters in new-generation information technology, high-end automobiles, industrial internet, and biomedicine.

Driverless cars, modular vertical factories, naked-eye 3D displays, and 24/7 unattended production lines are common there. The area also boasts excellent livability - over 94 percent of it is within a 500 meter service radius of a park or green space and all sewage there is collected and recycled.

It has grown from a small industrial park that covered 3.83 square kilometers some 30 years ago to a 225-square kilometer economic-technological development area. Its share in Beijing's total industrial output once stood at just 0.1 percent, but today it is the largest contributor in this regard.

Beijing E-Town is impressive for its futurism and imagination.

The Tongming Lake National Information Technology Application Innovation Park located in Beijing E-Town, which is also known as the national information technology application innovation base, is a hub for high-end, frontier and high-value information enterprises.

According to a management executive of the park, the park is home to nearly 250 enterprises engaged in chip development, supercomputing, databases, sensors and more, and over 90 percent of China's top IT firms have set up offices there.

In a warehouse spanning tens of thousands of square meters owned by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com in Beijing E-Town, no human worker was in sight. The only things moving were a group of red robots climbing up and down the shelves.

"We are enabled by AI to accurately predict sales in certain areas, so we can better prepare our stock. The accuracy is about 92 percent and the forecasting tech is fully self-developed," said Wu Meng, vice president of JD.com.

"A lipid spheres looks like a 200-nanometer ball under an electron microscope. The drug features targeted delivery technology that can transport the lipid spheres to blood vessel lesions for precise treatment," said Zhao Yanping, vice president of Beijing Tide Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., showing the company's achievements in pharmaceutical technology.

At the general assembly plant of Beijing Benz, a joint venture between the Mercedes-Benz and BAIC Group, multiple models of vehicles were being manufactured by flexible production lines, on which a vehicle was rolled off every 45 seconds.

According to Sun Hui, chairman of Beijing Benz's labor union, the plant is able to produce front-, rear- and electric-drive models, as well as engines and power batteries. "We are also exporting core engine components and whole engines," Sun added.

Director of the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area Management Committee Kong Lei noted that as Beijing's only economic and technological development zone at national level, the area is actively bettering its layout in cutting-edge industries and spearheading technological innovations. The area aims to build itself into a new hub of high-quality growth, Kong added.

Beijing E-Town focuses on both manufacturing and high-tech industries. "We are engaged in the high-tech sector. Firms settling here must fit our positioning," Kong noted.

According to him, Beijing E-Town's per-unit industrial output has kept rising, reaching around 31 billion yuan per square kilometer.

From high-end medical equipment makers setting up global innovation centers there, to breakthroughs in domestic production and mass application of ultra HD and flexible displays, Beijing E-Town is growing into a platform for aggregating innovative resources and a pivot for transforming outcomes into realization.

To optimize the business environment, Beijing E-Town is accelerating the transition of approval process from "streamlining" to "maximum simplification." It is comprehensively advancing reforms to make the business environment market-oriented, law-based, internationalized and convenient.

Tu Ruimin, who works at the administration service center of Beijing E-Town, told People's Daily that it used to take four trips to two offices over 17 workdays for a foreigner to get work permit, and now it can be done in a week through a one-stop service counter.

Since its founding, Beijing E-Town has attracted 1,043 foreign-invested firms with nearly $11 billion in utilized foreign investment. This shows the confidence of foreign investors in the business environment of Beijing E-Town.

The first million-square meter international talent community recently broke ground in Beijing E-town, with an aim to attract more talents from across the world. It will feature a 40,000-square meter park, ancillary facilities blending diverse cultures, and fully intelligent and eco-friendly community scenarios.

It is learned that the total talent pool of Beijing E-Town currently reaches 349,200 people, and the number of invention patents per 10,000 people stands at 839, more than three times the average level of Beijing.