A visitor examines products at an electronics fair in Chengdu last August, held as the city emerges as a major IT hub in China. Xue Yubin / Xinhua

Capital of Sichuan home to many high-tech giants

Chengdu further consolidated its position as a major IT hub in China when it hosted a large software trade event in early April.

From April 11 to 12, China Soft 2013 drew more than 3,000 participants to the capital of Sichuan province, including such big names as Sandy Gupta, Microsoft China's national technology officer, and Fan Ruiqi, president of Huawei Technologies storage products.

Founded in 2003 in Chengdu, China Soft is one of four major software events across the country.

"It has spurred and bore witness to the development of the city's software and IT industries," said a local official.

Official statistics show that Chengdu's software and IT service industries had revenues of 6.6 billion yuan ($1.07 billion) in 2003, a figure that rose to 175 billion yuan in 2012. The industry has maintained annual growth of more than 40 percent over the past five years.

The city has also made great strides in improving its infrastructure for IT and software development over the past decade.

Among the milestones is the 3.7 million-square-meter Tianfu Sofware Park in the Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone. Started in 2005, it is Asia's largest specialized business IT park and one of China's top 10 centers for the software industry.

Chengdu is now home to operations by more than 400 domestic and international software and IT enterprises including IBM, SAP, NEC, Cisco, EMC, Philips, Dell, Huawei, Ubisoft, Alibaba, Maersk, Siemens, Ericsson and Tencent.

Fan from Huawei said at the China Soft 2013 that his company relocated to Chengdu a month before and decided to make the city the headquarters of its storage products, according to Chengdu Daily.

One of the latest to join the IT and software giants in Chengdu is China's largest search engine Baidu. On April 12, it unveiled its technical center for cloud developers, the largest of its kind nationwide, at the city's high-tech industrial development zone, the West China Metropolis Daily reported.

In addition to free office space, developers at the center will also have access to testing equipment and favorable policies, helping cut costs in research and development for new startups, the report said.

The center is expected to boost entrepreneurship in Chengdu's mobile Internet sector, said an official at the development zone.

Statistics show that Chengdu is now home to more than 500 mobile Internet enterprises with at total staff of 20,000.

The rise of Chengdu as a high-tech hub is partly due to its talent pool. The city is home to many renowned universities including Sichuan University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

They provide the quality new talent to the industry, said Gu Yi, Intel's public affairs director for western China, who noted that more than 70 percent of its 3,000 employees are locals.

The world's major chipmaker is one of the first multinational IT giants to make a home in Chengdu. It first announced its plan to establish a plant in the city in 2003.

In January this year, the Chengdu unit rolled out its 1-billionth chip, showing the facility has ramped up since producing 480 million chips by 2010.

He said the city government has been helpful, especially in times of adversity.

"We used to transport our chips to Hong Kong by air but they were cancelled when the Wenchuan earthquake struck in 2008," said Gu.

"Seeing this, the government immediately organized flights for Intel and several other IT companies in Chengdu. With its help, we quickly restored our daily transport to Hong Kong."

According to Gu, the Chengdu factory has become the largest chip packaging and testing center among Intel's five global facilities and also one of the three largest wafer pre-treatment plants in the world.

lifusheng@chinadaily.com.cn