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On the first working day after the Spring Festival in 2021, the municipal party committee and the municipal government held a "Five New Cities" construction symposium in Fengxian, firing the "starting gun" for a new round of new city construction, which also brought accelerated development opportunities for Fengxian. On June 11, at the "Media Sees New City" Fengxian special session, Tian Zhe, Deputy District Head of the People's Government of Fengxian District, introduced that over the past two years, Fengxian has been based on the positioning of "the western gateway of the new area, the urban center of South Shanghai, and the dynamic new city of the Yangtze River Delta," and is fully committed to creating a people's city and a city of the future that is innovative, entrepreneurial, livable, and suitable for business.

A solid industrial foundation is the strong driving force for the rapid development of Fengxian. In recent years, Fengxian has continued to carry out industrial development actions, leveraged comparative advantages, clarified industrial positioning, optimized industrial layout, and cultivated an industrial ecosystem, achieving a rapid leap in industrial capacity.

Li Yiming, Deputy Director of the Economic Commission of Fengxian District, introduced that in 2023, Fengxian's GDP reached 141.471 billion yuan, with a comparable growth of 3.4%, ranking 4th in the suburban areas. Among them, the added value of the secondary industry was 90.32 billion yuan, accounting for 63.9% of the total industrial structure of the district. The total added value of the secondary industry has ranked fourth in the city, following Pudong, Jiading, and Minhang, and is firmly advancing towards the 100 billion yuan mark.

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At present, Fengxian has basically formed four major industrial clusters: beauty and health, new energy, new materials, and digital economy.

In the beauty and health industry, Oriental Beauty Valley is a shining business card for Fengxian and even Shanghai. It has grown from scratch, from excellent to strong, and has formed a three-product structure of pharmaceuticals, food, and cosmetics.

The biopharmaceutical industry completed a scaled output value of 22.55 billion yuan in 2023, ranking third in the city, gathering biopharmaceutical companies such as Shanghai Institute of Biology, WuXi Biologics, and I-Mab; in the food sector, it has gathered a group of high-quality enterprises such as Bright Food, Guan Sheng Yuan, Dingfeng, and Miaokelan Duo, while Fengxian also aims at emerging consumer demands, developing high-end food, special medical food, etc.

On the "beauty" track, Oriental Beauty Valley has attracted many well-known domestic and foreign enterprises such as Shiseido, L'Oréal, Nu Skin, Galen, and Cosmax, with an overall industrial scale close to 70 billion yuan, and has become one of the largest-scale and most well-known cosmetics clusters in Shanghai and China. The natural hall rooted in Oriental Beauty Valley has now established more than 40,000 retail outlets nationwide, with nearly 5,000 employees, and is an industry leader with excellent market share, consumer reputation, and social influence in China.

"One out of every four facial masks sold nationwide is produced by Oriental Beauty Valley, and the brand value of Oriental Beauty Valley has reached 33.8 billion yuan," Li Yiming introduced. In 2023, the total output value of the cosmetics industry in Fengxian District was 12.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.2%.

In the digital economy sector, Fengxian aims at unmanned driving and has created the first domestic "smart full travel chain" open test area for autonomous driving, approved by the Ministry of Transport as a pilot. The Digital River and Sea International Industrial City (hereinafter referred to as "Digital River and Sea") under construction will be built as a carrier of strategic emerging industries such as the digital economy and an interpretation field of the digital twin city.

Tian Zhe said that Digital River and Sea is the "No. 1 project" of Fengxian New City, with an area of nearly 2 square kilometers and a development volume of 2.3 million square meters, achieving an organic integration of manufacturing with R&D, commerce, and residential functions. It is planned to take about 10 years to build it into a demonstration area of industry-city integration and a new highland for the development of future industries.According to the person in charge of Digital Jianghai, Digital Jianghai has constructed a digital twin city system, creating a "fusion of virtual and real, interdependence of data and reality" for the "three cities" of above ground, underground, and in the cloud—parks and buildings on the ground, composite spaces underground, and a city in the cloud made up of data. This will become "Shanghai's first fully penetrated digital international industrial district with urban power."

At present, Digital Jianghai has clearly identified smart terminals as the leading industry, precision medicine as the advantageous industry, and quantum computing as the key research industry. In the process of promoting industrial development, "investment attraction first," it has docked with more than a hundred high-quality projects, including the world-leading cloud computing technology center of Alibaba Cloud and Wutong Sensing Control, a high-tech company with internationally leading off-electric thin-film pressure sensing material technology.

In the future, Digital Jianghai will also introduce 1,000 companies, provide 20,000 job positions, achieve an operating income of 100 billion yuan/year, and become a new highland for industrial aggregation in South Shanghai.

In addition, in the new energy sector, driven by Tesla, core parts companies for new energy vehicles have gathered in Fengxian, with brands such as CATL and Jingsheng Electronics being representatives, achieving a standardized output value of 48.51 billion yuan in 2023. In the new material sector, the industrial levels of Fengxian's high-end electronic chemicals, polymer composite materials, high-performance water-based materials, and high-performance membrane materials are continuously rising, with the new material industry cluster achieving a standardized industrial output value of 24.68 billion yuan in 2023.

While creating a good industrial environment for mature companies, Fengxian is also focusing on incubating scientific and innovative enterprises, creating more innovative entities, and stimulating continuous development vitality. Fengchuang Valley Science and Innovation Base is such a park that gathers many new forces.

Fengchuang Valley started operation in September 2016 and is a science and innovation park invested and constructed by the Shanghai Industrial Comprehensive Development Zone, with a total area of 50 acres, a total construction area of 100,000 square meters, and a total investment of 560 million yuan.

Zhu Chunjuan, the general manager of Fengchuang Valley, introduced that the park is composed of three L-shaped buildings. Building 1 is mainly for the beauty and health industry, Building 2 is mainly for intelligent information industries. Building 3 is a key biotechnology building of Fengchuang Valley and is also a building with a high degree of industrial aggregation. More than 90% of the 35 companies that have settled in are biopharmaceutical companies, and a number of high-quality biotechnology companies such as Bojie Medical and Yuansong Bio have been incubated and cultivated.

At present, Fengchuang Valley has aggregated 149 companies, and for the first time in 2020, its tax revenue broke through 100 million yuan, becoming the first billion-yuan building in the development zone. In order to better promote the development of start-ups, Zhu Chunjuan said that some growth plans will also be launched this year to assist enterprises in investment and financing. "We will establish a growth fund, which is currently in the process of filing."

Fengxian not only wants industrial development but also high-quality development. While promoting the development of new industries, Fengxian is also vacating inefficient enterprises, with a total of 150 inefficient enterprises adjusted out in 2023. At the same time, the number of strategic emerging industries in the district's industrial enterprises increased to 234, with a total output value of 121.18 billion yuan, a comparable growth of 5.0%, a growth rate that is 6.8 percentage points higher than the city, and the proportion of strategic emerging industries exceeds 43%, becoming the main engine driving the growth of the district's industry.A solid industrial foundation, combined with the vigorous growth of emerging industries, has propelled the continuous expansion of Fengxian's industrial scale. Li Yiming revealed that in 2023, Fengxian District achieved an industrial output value of 280.8 billion yuan for above-designated-size industries, compared to the 190.15 billion yuan achieved in 2020. In just three years, Fengxian's industrial output value for above-designated-size industries has increased by nearly 100 billion yuan, with an average annual compound growth rate of 13.9%.

It is worth mentioning that Fengxian District's "14th Five-Year Plan" target for industrial output value of above-designated-size industries was 250 billion yuan. "In fact, we achieved the target three years ahead of schedule," said Li Yiming, which far exceeded the expectations when the plan was initially formulated.

According to the report, in the future, Fengxian will closely focus on the strategic goal of "Beautiful Fengxian, Strong Fengxian," based on its own resources and development reality. It will seize development opportunities such as the Fengxian New City and the Lingang New Area, and make every effort to stabilize the economy, strive for economic growth, explore new paths, and implement practical measures. This will consolidate the foundation for stable economic growth, enhance the level of new industrialization, deepen the development of distinctive industrial clusters, facilitate the domestic and international dual circulation, and cultivate a first-class industrial development ecosystem.