Guangzhou is demonstrating vibrant momentum for development as the new year begins. Over 1,700 key enterprises and 1,100 major projects in the city maintained operations or resumed work ahead of schedule during the Spring Festival holiday. Since the sixth day of the lunar new year, five complimentary special trains have been arranged to transport returning workers, signaling a strong start to the year. On February 25, Guangzhou convened its high-quality development conference. Municipal Party Committee Secretary Feng Zhonghua emphasized the city's commitment to balancing industrial and commercial development while integrating manufacturing and service sectors, aiming to strengthen the industrial foundation for modernization and create new prospects for high-quality growth.
The conference highlighted Guangzhou's focus on merging manufacturing and services, identifying the fundamental approach as building a modern industrial system. This involves deepening the integration of advanced manufacturing and modern services, accelerating the development of a distinctive Guangzhou model where trade promotes industry and industry revitalizes trade, thereby fostering mutual enhancement and driving the industrial system toward higher-end, smarter, and greener transformation. Peng Pang, Executive President of the Guangdong System Reform Research Association and President of the Guangzhou Doctor Scientific Innovation Research Association, noted that Guangzhou, as a millennial commercial hub, possesses profound industrial and commercial heritage. As the provincial capital of the Pearl River Delta, a world-class manufacturing base, and a core engine of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Guangzhou holds significant advantages in integrating the two sectors. The next step should involve leveraging technological innovation as a link to form new development models for this integration, striving to lead the way in the province and nationwide.
Currently, major power competition is reshaping the global industrial landscape, with the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation accelerating and collaborative integration trends becoming more pronounced. Guangzhou's industrial strength lies in its comprehensive nature, where robust production capacity and developed trade networks complement each other. The city has cultivated six industrial clusters and ten service sectors each worth over a hundred billion yuan, hosting more than 60% of the province's universities, 70% of national key laboratories, and 80% of research institutions. With technological innovation accumulating momentum, Guangzhou is at a critical breakthrough period for成果转化. By 2025, Guangzhou aims to adhere to a real economy focus, fully promote industrial transformation and upgrading, achieve an average annual industrial investment growth of over 10%, raise the proportion of advanced manufacturing in industry and producer services in the service sector to around 60%, surpass an economic aggregate of 3.2 trillion yuan, and exceed 4 million market entities, driving more qualitative, resilient, and dynamic development.
Starting from processing with supplied materials, to extending toward both ends of the value chain's "smile curve," and evolving into a city of intelligent vehicles, displays, and customization, Guangzhou's industries have continuously upgraded. Throughout this journey, the interaction, integration, and协同演进 of industry and commerce have become ingrained in the city's fabric, forming its most distinct development标识. In the conference's exhibition area, an embodied robot attracted attention. With millimeter-level precision, the silver-gray robotic arm hovered over red paper, dipping in ink, wielding the brush, and finishing strokes to write a traditional Chinese "福" character. This was the "Li Dian F1" robot manufactured by Guangzhou Li Gong Industrial Co., Ltd. Cao Yuran, Senior Manager of the company's Marketing Department, explained that this humanoid robot was initially positioned for industrial manufacturing, applied in high-value production workshops, bioscience labs, and inspection laboratories to perform high-flexibility tasks such as lab pipetting, workshop transport, and loading/unloading, thereby enhancing production efficiency.
As times evolve, demand for humanoid robots across different scenarios continues to expand. Wu Sa, Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Director of the Guangzhou Development and Reform Commission, stated that the new round of industrial competition is shifting from single technology or product rivalry to ecosystem contests driven by scenarios. Leveraging experience in motion control and visual coordination accumulated in the industrial field, Li Gong Technology is extending application scenarios to the service sector. For instance, at Haixinsha Technology Island's smart retail scenario, robots can quickly and accurately deliver souvenirs based on tablet orders, providing intelligent service experiences for domestic and international guests. Future explorations include unmanned smart service scenarios like智慧驿站. "The extension from manufacturing to services is not a one-way output. We also plan to collect customer feedback and interaction data in service scenarios to optimize action logic and human-machine interaction capabilities, then feed the upgraded technology back into industrial manufacturing, forming a virtuous cycle of 'manufacturing-service-optimization-rem manufacturing' for bidirectional enhancement," Cao added.
"The key to integrating the two sectors lies in driving deep industry-academia-research integration through technological innovation, especially establishing leadership in emerging industries and future industrial clusters," Peng Pang suggested. While Guangzhou ranks high nationally in relevant indicators, it still needs improvement in source innovation, top talent, and benchmark enterprises. Therefore, the crucial lever for advancing balanced industrial-commercial development and sector integration is to accelerate the formation of new advantages in technological innovation sourcing and industrial application translation, creating a batch of phenomenal enterprises, iconic products, and leading scenarios in future industries like artificial intelligence and humanoid robots, shaping benchmarks for new quality productive forces in the millennial commercial hub.
In practical applications, Guangzhou promotes research and production through usage, expanding integrated scenarios like smart manufacturing, digital trade, and smart logistics to facilitate the local transformation, application, and value addition of innovation成果. Peng Pang emphasized that enhancing balanced industrial-commercial development and sector integration hinges on promoting mutual reinforcement between industry and technology. During the 2026 Spring Festival, Pony.ai's Robotaxi continued operations in Shenzhen, with daily order volumes repeatedly hitting new highs. Pony.ai's autonomous vehicles are becoming a tech tourism名片 for Shenzhen. At Guangzhou's high-quality development conference, Pony.ai, as a globally leading L4 autonomous driving enterprise, collaborated with automotive manufacturing leader GAC Group to seamlessly integrate advanced manufacturing capabilities with unmanned service abilities. Breaking from the traditional "retrofitted technology" model, based on GAC Aion's global model Tyrannosaurus (Aion V), they achieved collaborative optimization in vehicle design and full-chain integration from production to operational support.
From a commercialization perspective, this cooperation combines Pony.ai's technology and operations with GAC's manufacturing and supply chain advantages. By exploring a business model of "technology licensing + operational services + data closed-loop," they率先 achieved positive unit economics for city-level single vehicles in Guangzhou. It is reported that nearly 400 vehicles have been deployed through this collaboration. "Guangzhou has advantages in traditional industries, automobiles, biomedicine, etc., but the real breakthrough lies in various applications of artificial intelligence," Peng Pang opined. AI is a penetrating technology and model that can deeply infiltrate all industries and production-life domains. AI application scenarios precisely represent the breakthrough point for balanced industrial-commercial development and sector integration, where Guangzhou possesses a strong foundation and greater potential to form comparative advantages.
In another exhibition area at the conference, Gowild Technology showcased a scaled-down model of Shenzhen's Hongling South Station, illustrating the innovative application of its "Transportation Harmony" system based on OpenHarmony in subway stations. This system has been implemented at Hongling South Station, serving as the first smart station pilot based on OpenHarmony nationally and globally. It unifies device languages, enabling seamless communication between different brand devices, solving interconnection challenges between systems, and significantly improving station operational efficiency. The renovated station achieves one-click intelligent management, reducing the opening process from requiring 4-5 staff members and about 30 minutes to just one staff member clicking a mouse in the control room, completing platform announcements, lighting activation, shutter opening, display startup, and escalator operation in approximately 5 minutes.
Chen Jiao, Chairman and Executive President of Gowild Technology Group, stated that the company has long advocated "using software to define hardware" in the intelligent transportation industry, which highly aligns with this year's proposal for bidirectional manufacturing-service integration. "Using software to define hardware" brings two main values: first, algorithm upgrades for existing front-end hardware products in urban governance, iterating them into new-generation products through more advanced data-driven algorithms; second, developing new-generation intelligent terminals to replace traditional equipment and apply them in innovative scenarios, with the latter holding broader development prospects in the future. Discussing new economic growth points post sector integration, Chen suggested that with AI technological advancement and rising user demand for artificial intelligence, users in urban and traffic governance are gradually accustomed to applying AI technology. Increasing numbers of intelligent terminal products will adapt to this demand, bringing significant value to industry quality and efficiency improvement, cost reduction, and efficiency gain, with promising market prospects.