City of Brands
Traditional and hi-tech industries boost the growth of Jinjiang, making it a global player in the branding stakes
At 5:55 p.m. local time on October 15, 2017, in Olbia City on the Italian island of Sardinia, President of the International School Sport Federation Laurent Petrynka began opening an envelope containing the winner of the bid to host the Gymnasiade 2020, an international sporting event for young athletes. The meeting room was silent. He pulled a card out of the envelope. It read “Jinjiang 2020.”
Jinjiang, a small coastal city in southeast China’s Fujian Province, will become the second Chinese city to host the event, after its 11th edition in Shanghai in 1998. Its successful bid is apt recognition of the city’s development in the past few decades.
“I’m very excited and proud of my hometown,” said Ding Shizhong, Chairman and CEO of Anta Sports, one of China’s largest sports shoe manufacturers, having followed the bidding process from start to finish.
Anta Sports was born in Jinjiang in 1991, and has grown into China’s leading sportswear brand with over 10,000 outlets and a market value ranked third in the industry worldwide, after Nike and Adidas. The brand has been both witness to and participant in the city’s growth.
Jinjiang has been called the “City of Brands” for cultivating over 68,000 registered trademarks, including 42 of China’s well-known trademarks including Anta, and is well known for a thriving private economy. But there is more to Jinjiang than traditional industries. The city is working to upgrade its traditional sectors and nurture hi-tech development.
“We hope that mature traditional industries can serve as a solid base for the development of emerging industries, and that the advancement of the latter can bring a new look to the former,” Wang Wenhui, Vice Mayor of Jinjiang, told Chinafrica.
A shoe story
Jinjiang is now known as the world’s largest production base for sports shoes.
According to the city’s official statistics, one out of every five pairs of sports shoes worldwide is made in Jinjiang, with over 4,800 shoe companies in the city employing 280,000 people. Besides Anta, many big brands like Xtep and 361 Degrees also originated in the city. The city’s shoe industry began in a small satellite town called Chendai, which now, along with other parts of Jinjiang, has over 100 shoe brands. Not all of them would survive the competition of the following decades, but those that did prospered and went on to claim a substantial share of the domestic market. Today the shoe industry forms one of the two industrial clusters in Jinjiang whose worth exceeds 100 billion yuan ($15.2 billion), the other being textiles and garments. Chendai is now in the process of taking the shoe industry to the next level by building a large market called Jinjiang International Shoes and Textile City covering an area of 527 hectares. Since it opened last October, over 1,000 commercial tenants have already moved in, selling raw and processed materials for shoe-making such as accessories, fabric and leather.
“We target not only the domestic market, but also customers all around the world,” Li Xiaohuan, General Manager of the market, said, adding that they are hoping to build it into the largest shoe material trading center in Asia with a complete and innovative range of raw materials and accessories.
Ding Wanyu, Manager of a company producing fabric for shoes, said the new market has helped business people like her reach international customers through trade fairs and exhibitions.
“We have established links with customers from South America and the Middle East, and I believe that continuing to upgrade our products to cater to customers’ demands is the key to better business,” she said.
Despite Ding’s success, finding a way into the global market is not easy and Ding is aware of the gap between Anta Sports and
other global industry leaders.
“This year we plan to visit the foremost technology companies in the United States and learn from them,” he said.
Hi-tech power
Entrepreneurs like Ding Shizhong have realized how important technology can be, and so has the Jinjiang Municipal Government. According to a government report, the city has cultivated 85 hi-tech companies so far, and research and development investment now accounts for 2.65 percent of the city’s GDP.
“But hi-tech industries account for a relatively small proportion of the city’s economy. Innovation-driven development here is far from strong,” said Vice Mayor Wang.
In 2016, the city began to develop its integrated circuit (IC) industry as a new engine of growth, in line with the national policy to advance IC technology.
According to Wang, Jinjiang will start with the production of memory chips, which currently lags behind in China, before going on to build a complete IC industry chain, incorporating design, manufacturing, packaging, testing, and terminal application.
“We plan to make the IC industry another industrial cluster worth more than 100 billion yuan ($14.9 billion) by 2025,” Wang said.
A well-developed IC industry can also help the city to upgrade traditional industries and products, such as shoes, clothes, daily-use items and machinery. Wang revealed that local manufacturers have already explored putting chips in shoes to make them more intelligent.
“Some companies are also trying to put chips in diapers to help detect and draw attention to children’s bowel movements, and even check their physiological status,” Wang said. He believes that traditional sectors provide a huge market and demand for the application of hi-tech industries.
Human resource strategy
Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit is one of the places where Jinjiang’s IC industry is burgeoning. Established in February 2016, the company has been working on a memory chip project as part of the national plan. Xu Zheng, Vice Manager of Jinhua, is a name inseparable from the story of the company’s growth. Xu used to work as an engineer in Silicon Valley of the United States, but he recently chose to settle down in Jinjiang.
“Jinjiang is a lot like Silicon Valley, a quiet place without the hustle and bustle of megacities, ideal for academic research,” he said.
In addition to personal preference, Jinjiang’s policies on high-caliber personnel played an important role in Xu’s decision to leave California. He benefits from the city’s preferential policy toward professionals in the IC industry, under which the government rates specialized personnel based on their education, academic achievements, experience, honors and awards, and provides subsidies in accommodations, medical care and children’s education accordingly.
To attract more professionals like Xu, local government has come up with a series of policies and incentives. According to a document released by the Jinjiang Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in June, persons with the requisite abilities are offered a maximum subsidy of 1.2 million yuan ($182,000) to buy a house, while startups can access seed funding of up to 30 million yuan ($4.56 million).
In addition to financial support, the city also pays attention to training for entrepreneurs and specialized professionals from different areas, especially hi-tech industries.
“The classes are not only a place to learn and expand the trainees’ horizons, but also a platform for them to innovate and find opportunities for cooperation,” Huang Jianhua, Deputy Director of the Organization Department of the CPC Jinjiang Municipal Committee, told Chinafrica.
Jinjiang is a lot like Silicon valley, a quiet place without the hustle and bustle of megacities, ideal for academic research. XU ZHENG vice Manager of Jinhua Integrated Circuit
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