The total output of Longhua District’s 752 core digital enterprises exceeded 466 billion yuan in 2021, which witnessed a 26.7 percent year-on-year growth, according to a recent report on the district’s digital industry.

Longhua has been serving as a pilot demonstration area of digital economy and a trail blazer in promoting digital economy, future city and smart governance and has launched a package of preferential policies to fully support the digital economy-related enterprises and projects in the district.

Over the past year, digital economy has become the major driving force of Longhua District. The district is currently foraging ahead with the digital transformation of its traditional industry and the commercialization of its newly-emerged digital industries.

For Powerleader, a local computer manufacturer in Longhua District, the utilization digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) at its industrial park has greatly improved the capacity and increased the enterprise’s annual output by 112.5 million yuan, according to the manager.

To further promote the digital transformation of enterprises, Longhua has mulled 10 general and 10 exclusive preferential policies for key digital industries and has invested over 3 billion yuan to help enterprises overcome the bottlenecks.

The district also mulled a smart service system to help the enterprises with their digital transformation. The system has responded to the inquiries from over 800 enterprises and provided relevant services to over 300 enterprises last year. It has also established four smart factories with three of them meeting nation’s top standard in 2021.

Since the implementation of “Digital Longhua” development strategy, Longhua District has been increasing its investments into research and development (R&D) sectors. Its total R&D expenditure has grown by 38.61 percent from 7.373 billion yuan in 2019 to 10.22 billion yuan in 2020, while the total R&D investment intensity has grown from 2.92 percent in 2019 to 4.1 percent in 2020.

Amid the recent flare-ups of COVID-19 infections across Shenzhen, Longhua has given full play to its digital economy and smart governance prowess to aid the fight against virus.

It launches a smart epidemiological investigation system which greatly reduces the time an investigation may take from four hours to less than 100 minutes; an one-stop identification checking system at Shenzhen North Railway Station; a WeChat miniprogram which can check the status of the nearby nucleic acid testing site and some other smart systems that greatly improve the efficiency of the grassroots level epidemic prevention work.

Yet that is only a tip of the iceberg of the district’s pursuit of smart urban governance mode. It established a total of 50 grassroots governance centers at community, subdistrict and district levels and launched an one-stop smart service platform which has gained a total of 280,000 users last year.

The district is also forging ahead with the construction of future city. Unmanned delivery, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and other new technologies have been applied to transportation facilities, business circles and tourist attractions across Longhua such as Shenzhen North Railway Station, Guanlan Culture Town and Dalang Fashion Town.