The manufacturing industry’s added value will remain above 30 percent of Guangdong Province’s total GDP by 2025, the provincial government said at a press conference in Guangzhou yesterday.

The province, China’s manufacturing powerhouse, endeavors to become a world-class base for advanced and innovative manufacturing and a pioneer in exploring high-level opening up and cooperation in the industry, and to create first-class environment for the development of manufacturing, as per the 14th Five-Year Plan for High-Quality Development of Manufacturing released at the conference.

By 2035, Guangdong aims to become a world leader in the comprehensive competitiveness of the manufacturing industry and a global manufacturing core area.

The plan stated that by 2025, the added value of high-tech manufacturing in the province will make up 33 percent of that of industries above designated size. Manufacturing enterprises in Guangdong above designated size will spend at least 2.3 percent of their income on R&D and obtain over 230,000 patents.

An enterprise above designated size refers to one with annual sales revenue of more than 20 million yuan (US$3 million).

Guangdong-made products will have a qualified rate of over 94 percent and the labor productivity of manufacturing enterprises above designated size will top 300,000 yuan per worker. By 2025, more than 50,000 industrial enterprises in the province will have digitalized their businesses.

High-tech enterprises will contribute to 35 percent of the province’s total foreign trade and the actual use of foreign investment in manufacturing will account for at least 20 percent of the provincial total.

The provincial government also has its sights set on specific emerging industrial chains and clusters, including green petrochemicals, intelligent home appliances, the automobile industry, biomedicine and health, modern agriculture and food, and intelligent robotics industries.

Guangdong, the country’s largest provincial economy, envisions around 5-percent annual economic growth in the coming five years.

The province’s GDP increased by 6 percent on average every year in the past five years to over 11 trillion yuan last year. It is expected to rise to about 14 trillion yuan in 2025 and twice that of 2020 in 2035.

In 2020, the added value of manufacturing industries above designated size in Guangdong amounted to 3 trillion yuan from 2.66 trillion yuan in 2015. The province is home to 50,000-strong manufacturing enterprises above designated size, the most in China.