Kunshan New and Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone

Kunshan New and Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone. [Photo/ks.gov.cn]

Kunshan New and Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone (KSND), covering a planning area of 118 square meters, was founded in 1994 and got this name in 2006. It became the first national-level hi-tech zone based in a county-level city in China in 2010.

KSND has a strong hi-tech industrial foundation due to attaching great importance to the technical innovation and the application of new technologies since its establishment, and positively promoting the high-technology industrialization in accordance with the standards of a national hi-tech zone.

Before being upgraded to a national-level hi-tech zone, it has developed three innovation platforms, introduced hundreds of research and development (R&D) institutions, and initially formed three leading industrial clusters of precision machinery, renewable energy and electronic information. Emerging industries, including the digital equipment, intelligent manufacturing and biomedicine industries, were also made account of.

The zone's GDP in 2009 were 37.76 billion yuan ($5.39 billion) and its total industrial output value reached 132.6 billion yuan, of which 107.6 billion yuan was created by the hi-tech industries. The comprehensive strength of the zone's development ranked fifth among all kinds of development zones in Jiangsu province for three consecutive years since 2007. The number of invention patents application in 2009 totaled 3,222.

In 2017, KSND's GDP reached 71.02 billion yuan, accounting for 20.18 percent of the city's total. By the end of 2017, there were a total of 5,736 enterprises in the zone, including 66 ones with an annual industrial output value above 20 million yuan, and the industrial value added amounted to 26.72 billion yuan.

The total export-import volume reached 5.92 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 7.1 percent, of which the amount of exports was 3.42 billion dollars. The registered foreign capital was 421.16 million dollars, an increase of 156.3 percent over the previous year while the actual utilized foreign capital reached 190.19 million dollars, a year-on-year increase of 18.8 percent.