A louder voice to the private economy: The 2022 World Dongguan Entrepreneurs Convention opens

Already a significant force for sustaining Dongguan’s economic growth, entrepreneurs of the southern Chinese city come to the 2022 World Dongguan Entrepreneurs Convention held on August 28-29. Besides the main venue in Dongguan, parallel sessions are also hosted in San Francisco, Hawaii, Germany, Australia, Canada, and Malaysia. Such a move helps attract greater investment from the global business community, including overseas Dongguan entrepreneurs.

“The main venue is physically joined by world-renowned companies, representatives of Dongguan entrepreneurs, and well-known experts and scholars, while parallel sessions are seeing the virtual participation of overseas Dongguan entrepreneurs. Over 1,000 figures attend the event, in person or via a video link,” said Liang Shaoguang, the deputy secretary general of the People’s Government of Dongguan Municipality, the Convention’s organizer.

Outstanding Dongguan entrepreneurs were honored for their devotion to sci-tech innovation and advanced manufacturing in such representative, influential high-tech industries as biomedicine, intelligent manufacturing, advanced equipment, and semiconductor materials, according to Liu Jiale, the Convention’s deputy secretary general.

Dongguan entrepreneurs as a whole, together with the private economy, are at the fulcrum of the city preserving its reputation as a manufacturing center, the World Dongguan Entrepreneurs Federation’s president Ouyang Zhong noted. For over four decades of reform and opening-up, Dongguan has grown into China’s hub for advanced manufacturing. Its major industrial firms outnumber those of other prefecture-level cities, and it is home to the country’s second-largest cluster of high-tech companies. These successes couldn’t have been made possible without a strong private economy. Statistics show that in 2021, the private sector accounted for 62% of the output of the city’s major industrial companies and 70% of their profits and taxation, while driving 62% of new job creation and making up 94% of market entities.

According to the Organizing Committee of the Convention, what merits attention is that the event also sees the convening of an economic summit and a forum on growing the semiconductor industry. Scholarly discussions at the forum are about ways to drive the next wave of globalization, Dongguan’s role in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, key technologies of the third-generation semiconductors and their future development, and how the city’s semiconductor businesses break through and pursue innovation in the post-COVID-19 era, among others. Such an exchange of views can essentially be a source of inspiration for Dongguan’s private companies as they are eager to seize new opportunities for technological breakthroughs, corporate transformation, and an even greater contribution to the city’s blueprint for sci-tech innovation and advanced manufacturing.

The Convention intends to convey two clear messages. First, Dongguan promises to stay committed to entrepreneurship, higher levels of literacy among workers in the private economy, and a community of energetic market players. Second, beyond maintaining an exemplary business climate nationwide, the city will go further in drawing talent and overseas investment for high-quality development.

Source: The Organizing Committee of the 2022 World Dongguan Entrepreneurs Convention