EDITOR’S note:

THIS year marks the 25th anniversary of Pudong New Area’s takeoff since opening-up of the area as an economic zone started in 1990. Pudong, literally the east bank of Huangpu River, has realized a drastic change from an impoverished swampy farmland into a prosperous modern urban and economic area. Sea changes are happening as Pudong is always at the forefront of reform and opening-up. Shanghai Daily is running a series of stories to record the area’s 25 years of development and new growth opportunities ahead.

YU Chengdong, Huawei Technologies’ head of consumer business group, highly praised the Shanghai research teams twice during an event when the No. 1 China-brand smartphone vendor launched a new flagship model P8 in the city last week.

“It represented Huawei’s latest technologies and efforts in making world-class products and establishing a global brand,” Yu said. “We can’t forget inventors of the advanced technologies (here).”

Huawei’s smartphone research center is in the Pudong New Area, which aims to boost economic development through structural upgrading and technological innovation.

Besides Huawei, China’s biggest telecommunications equipment maker, top companies including SAIC, ABB, China UnionPay, GE, Honeywell, SAP and yhd.com have set up facilities in Pudong. The Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, in central Pudong, has attracted top high-tech firms to what is often regarded as “China’s Sillicon Valley.”

The “star products” from Pudong include China-developed 4G chip; remote-controlled capsules with cameras to help doctors diagnose stomach problems; China’s own video standard to help local industry save patent cost of more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) annually; Beidou Navigation system to break the monopoly of GPS and a round smartwatch released earlier than Apple Watch.

Boosted by the technological development and innovation, Pudong’s service industry revenue accounted for 67 percent of the region’s total gross domestic product in 2014, higher than the national level of 46.1 percent and Shanghai’s 62.6 percent.

In 2014, Shanghai’s software and information industry revenue surpassed 500 billion yuan for the first time, a great leap from 100 billion yuan in 2006 and 300 billion yuan in 2013, according to the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Information Technology, the city’s local industry regulator.

Firms in the Shanghai Pudong Software Park in Zhangjiang, the city’s biggest software park and the national software export base, and its Lujiazui sub-park, contributed the major income of the city’s software and services industry.

The government has set up several strategic and promising industries for future development, including integrated circuit, advanced manufacturing and high-end China-brand automaking sectors. Each sector is expected to contribute 100 billion yuan in industry output within a few years.

Firms have invested heavily in “Key Project” in Pudong, representing world-class technology level and meeting urgent social and industrial demands. The projects include Shanghai-based National Center for Protein Science, 12-inch wafer plants for chips with the most advanced technologies, a research center for China’s commercial jet and battery development centers for electric cars.

Besides the huge and eye-catching projects, Pudong is attracting startups and entrepreneurs with interesting ideas, another engine to fuel economic development in future.

The city will support startup firms with “Four New Elements” — new technology, new business, new industry and new ecosystem, the commission said.

The related sectors include mobile Internet, online education, online audio and video services, big data, online finance, satellite navigation, automotive electronics, new-energy car, robotics, and industrial Internet.

Shanghai has branded tech firms in e-commerce (yhd.com), game (Shanda) and Internet finance (Wind Information) industries.

That’s the reason why Huawei’s Yu and Qingting.com’s founder Yang Ting-hao paid attention to Pudong.

Yang, who used to work in Microsoft and Hulu, founded podcast application qingting.com in 2011 in Pudong. It now has 150 million users with daily active user base of 9 million.

Compared with traditional radio and audio services, Qingting brings tailored services to audiences in the mobile Internet era, mainly in news, entertainment and novel contents. With social and cloud-computing technologies, its users spend 90 minutes on the services each day on average.

In future, the company, based in the Lujiazui park, aims to offer upgraded audio services for drivers and wearable computing users, said Yang.

Internet learning platform hujiang.com, based in the Pudong software park, is offering users finance services besides just English learning services.

Hujiang has banded with angel investors and venture capital firms to offer entrepreneurs packaged services, covering offices, funds, cloud schools and activities, to bring them necessary knowledge and skills. It has established two separate funds of 50 million yuan and 300 million yuan.

IC Coffee in Zhangjiang is the country’s only coffee outlet with an integrated circuit theme, co-founded by 92 partners in the IT or IC industry. It now offers regular IC seminars and establishes a bridge between startups and investors.

“We are not gathering here to sell coffee. Instead, we want to establish our own innovation platform and service organization,” said Kong Huawei, major founder of IC Coffee.

Now it has opened outlets in Beijing, Shenzhen and in the United States and Singapore. In 2015, it aims to open outlets in Xi’an, Chengdu, Wuxi, Suzhou and establish an incubation fund about 100 million yuan.

Pudong is the ideal place for more startups and entrepreneurs thanks to its favorable investment environment.

Up to now, Pudong has more than 100 public service platforms offering various features like searching for funds, checking patents and testing products.

The Shanghai city government has invested 2 billion yuan in a seed fund to support Pudong’s technological development. It has offered favorable policies to attract venture capital firms and related service organizations for “combination of technology and finance.”

It has tested the water of “Nasdaq-style IPO” (initial public offering), which allows unprofitable firms to possibly list in Shanghai.

By the end of 2014, the number of financial employees reached 280,000 in Pudong, accounting for 60 percent of the city’s whole financial talent base.

A high-tech shopping mall opened last year alongside the Shanghai Pudong Software Park to add to the existing facilities. The software park also offers professionals low-cost apartments near their companies.