Guangdong Province convened its provincial advanced manufacturing conference in Guangzhou on October 9, a high-level gathering that declared developing advanced manufacturing is the new call to arms for the province to build fresh advantages and achieve new breakthroughs from a new starting point.

In 2025, Guangdong achieved a regional GDP of 14,584.676 billion yuan, ranking first in China for 37 consecutive years. At its 2026 "first meeting of the new year," Guangdong proposed that over the next decade its total economic output should double compared with 2022 to reach roughly 25.8 trillion yuan, while per capita GDP should double compared with 2020 to reach the level of moderately developed countries.

How will Guangdong open up broad horizons for high-quality development and modernization? Signals released at the conference show that the province will advance comprehensively into advanced manufacturing, focusing efforts on building industrial clusters, improving quality and efficiency, establishing enterprise systems, and shaping the business environment, so as to walk a path of new industrialization with Chinese characteristics.

Guangdong possesses a solid manufacturing foundation. From 2020 to 2025, the operating revenue of industrial enterprises above designated size across the province jumped from 14.9 trillion yuan to 19.34 trillion yuan, maintaining the largest scale in the country. At present, Guangdong is home to 76,000 industrial enterprises above designated size and 74,000 national high-tech enterprises, both ranking first nationwide.

The conference proposed that Guangdong should build a vibrant corporate community, strengthen the tiered cultivation of quality enterprises, and work hard to bolster the top tier, expand the middle tier, and solidify the foundational tier, creating a rainforest-style industrial ecosystem in which large, medium, and small enterprises develop in a coordinated and interconnected way, while pooling efforts to upgrade industrial parks.

Guangdong should also focus on cultivating key industrial clusters, continuously expanding the increment of emerging industries, nurturing the variables of future industries, and optimizing the stock of traditional industries, to create more hundred-billion-yuan and trillion-yuan industrial clusters.

It is reported that Guangdong has cumulatively established 8 national advanced manufacturing clusters and 30 national-level specialized and distinctive industrial clusters for small and medium-sized enterprises, forming 10 trillion-yuan industrial clusters.

Behind the accelerated rise of Guangdong's manufacturing clusters is the support of high-level innovation platforms. At present, Guangdong has 6 national-level manufacturing innovation centers, ranking first in the country, with a cumulative 22,000 patent applications. Meanwhile, Guangdong's regional innovation capability has ranked first nationwide for nine consecutive years. In 2025, the "Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou" innovation cluster rose to first place among the world's top 100 innovation clusters for the first time, and retained the top spot in 2026.

Guangdong will further drive the development of advanced manufacturing with advanced technology engines. The conference proposed that Guangdong should persist in using cross-sector integration to spawn new technologies and new business forms, and focus on promoting the integrated development of the digital economy and the real economy as well as the integrated development of the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries.

Guangdong should strengthen demand orientation, application traction, and scenario promotion, with emphasis on cultivating and opening up application scenarios and building new infrastructure such as computing power networks, so as to become the "preferred host" for new technologies to accelerate from point breakthroughs to broad application.

Wu Hong, a first-level inspector of the Guangdong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, said in an interview that Guangdong will push forward in depth the intelligent, green, and integrated development of manufacturing, advance a new generation of intelligent manufacturing, deepen the intelligent transformation and digital upgrading of manufacturing, improve the ecosystem for artificial intelligence development, and build and make good use of the "Yue Zhi Fu" platform, so as to fully empower manufacturing development with artificial intelligence as the engine.

Many manufacturing enterprises in Guangdong have taken the lead in exploring intelligent transformation. "TCL has completed its transformation from a traditional home appliance manufacturing enterprise to an advanced manufacturing industrial group," said Wang Cheng, chief executive officer of TCL Technology Group Corporation. Over the past few years, the company has invested a cumulative 200 to 300 billion yuan in Guangdong, mainly concentrated in the semiconductor display field. The company has developed a large model applied to the vertical field of semiconductor display, used to optimize material development, production processes, and process improvements.

"New technologies such as artificial intelligence can effectively help enterprises narrow the gap with industry competitors and consolidate and expand existing competitive advantages," Wang Cheng said.

CanSemi Technology Inc. is Guangdong's first 12-inch wafer manufacturing enterprise to achieve mass production. Chen Jin, the company's chairman, said that amid the global integrated circuit industry downturn in 2023, CanSemi's capacity utilization rate briefly hovered just above 60%. Through vigorous efforts to link upstream and downstream industries within Guangdong "like beads on a string" and integrate end applications, the company's capacity utilization rate has exceeded 90% in the past two years, with ample order reserves.

Chen Jin suggested that Guangdong should build more "CanSemi for Guangdong use" scenarios to open up verification scenarios for domestic equipment, materials, and technical services; at the same time, it should precisely coordinate "industrial cultivation" and "investment attraction," helping to build an important core for "creating a new Guangdong."