As part of the past few years witnessing south China’s island province of Hainan comprehensively promoting the cultivation, identification and services for high-tech enterprises, the capital city of Haikou hosted an annual meeting on the development of high-tech enterprises on February 27, with an industrial report released.

Staff in the Resort Software Community, one of the eleven key industrial parks in the Hainan Free Trade Port. (Photo / Wang Jiangjiu)

According to the report, over the past decade (with an average annual growth rate of 31.62%)—the number of high-tech enterprises in Hainan has continued to grow both more rapidly than other fields and more rapidly than the growth of high-tech enterprises elsewhere in China. Especially from 2017 to 2022, the average annual growth rate of the number of high-tech enterprises reached an astonishing 41.78%. Not only was the growth rate significantly faster than the national 25%, it also shows a year on year trend of accelerated development. On the basis of the next five years' goals, it is expected that the growth rate will steady itself at 30%.  

The quality of Hainan's high-tech enterprises has also been improving year by year. Statistics showed the province's high-tech enterprises realizing CNY 125.86 billion (USD 18.26 billion) in operating income in 2022 and, of the 167 enterprises with operating income exceeding CNY 100 million (USD 14.5 million), 19 exceeding CNY 1 billion (USD 145 million).

Furthermore, they are also becoming more innovative. Among the top 20 private R&D investment enterprises in the province selected by the Provincial Federation of Industry and Commerce in 2022, 15 of them are high-tech.

 

Researchers conducting an experiment in an enterprise based in the Haikou National High-Tech Industrial Development Zone, one of the eleven key industrial parks in the Hainan Free Trade Port. (Photo / Yuan Chen)

During this year’s  conference, leading enterprise Qilu Pharmaceutical (Hainan) Co., Ltd. was awarded a CNY 10 million (USD 1.45 million) R&D subsidy. Achieving a revenue of more than CNY 3.5 billion (USD 0.5 billion) in 2022, with an average annual growth rate of 20.89% in output value over the three-year Covid-19 pandemic, Qilu has paid the most tax of any of the enterprises in the Haikou National High-Tech Industrial Development Zone.