In the Yangtze River Delta industrial landscape, Guande, Anhui, was once a silent “industrial wasteland.” Today, driving into the Guande Economic Development Zone, one is greeted by a series of modern factories, with vehicles transporting materials bustling about.In the modern electronics industry, printed circuit boards (PCBs) are core components of electronic products, occupying an indispensable position alongside chips and panels, collectively known as the three major components of the electronic information industry, earning the title of “mother of electronic products.”Currently, Guande gathers more than two-thirds of the PCB enterprises in Anhui Province and 80% of the output value, achieving an industrial output value of 8.9 billion yuan in 2024, successfully selected as a national-level characteristic industrial cluster for small and medium-sized enterprises in 2024. In the first half of this year, Guande’s electronic circuit industry achieved an output value of 5.14 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.3%.
From an “industrial wasteland” to an “innovation highland” with 92 electronic circuit enterprises and an annual output value exceeding 10 billion yuan, Guande has systematically planned and uniquely evolved, carving out a distinctive industrial landmark amidst the wave of industrial transfer in the Yangtze River Delta.
From “Industrial Wasteland” to “Investment Card”Going back to around 2010, PCB enterprises in the core area of the Yangtze River Delta were suffering from rising land and labor costs and tightening environmental policies, creating a wave of industrial transfer. Guande, adjacent to Jiangsu and Zhejiang, keenly sensed this historic opportunity.However, facing an industry previously labeled as “high pollution,” Guande did not shy away nor choose conventional investment attraction paths, but instead executed a remarkable “reverse operation.”For attracting the PCB industry, “the greatest sincerity” may be to first address one of their major pain points—”environmental anxiety.”Thus, Guande specially planned 1,605 acres of land (later expanded to over 3,200 acres) as the “cradle” of the PCB industrial park, investing heavily and simultaneously constructing a dedicated wastewater treatment plant and a solid copper board processing center. They innovatively implemented an environmental governance model of “classified collection, centralized treatment, and recycling,” which was later named the “Guande Model” by the China Electronic Circuit Industry Association, achieving an excellent result of over 90% wastewater recycling rate and 100% hazardous waste harmless treatment rate. The park’s electroplating center centrally processes metal surface technology, saving enterprises over 200 million yuan in self-built facility investments each year.This became Guande’s most persuasive “investment card.”In 2014, Guande Tongling Electronics Co., Ltd. relocated from Suzhou. The company’s Deputy General Manager Yan Hao said, “If we were to build our own wastewater treatment plant, we would need to equip a dedicated team for daily management. Now, directly connecting to the service is so much easier, and the environmental responsibility has shifted to a professional institution, which gives us more peace of mind.”In May 2023, Chip Jun De Technology (Anhui) Co., Ltd. settled in Guande. “If we were to build it ourselves, it would cost at least 40 million yuan. Now the company just needs to connect and pay a reasonable usage fee, saving a significant amount of investment costs,” said Yu Yuying, the head of the company’s public affairs department.Now, the park’s supporting facilities are complete, with a centralized wastewater treatment plant, solid waste treatment center, employee service center, standardized factories, testing center, and other functional supporting infrastructure, reducing the average construction cycle for enterprises by 60%, truly achieving “plug-and-play”.From “Enterprise Gathering” to “Industrial Cluster”The gathering of enterprises is just the first chapter of the story. Guande’s ambition is to transform these enterprises from “physically adjacent” to “chemically integrated,” building an industrial ecosystem where they share weal and woe, achieving a qualitative leap from scale expansion to value enhancement.Today, the Guande PCB industrial park has achieved full-chain coverage from “glass fiber yarn—glass fiber cloth—copper-clad laminate—printed circuit board—electronic product application.”“Strengthening the chain and supplementing the chain” is no longer just a term on paper, but an industrial reality happening every day. Guande has successively introduced upstream copper-clad laminate material enterprises such as Yangsheng and Baoda Precision, as well as specialized vertical electroplating equipment manufacturers like Dongwei Technology. The entry of these key link enterprises has significantly reduced the procurement costs and supply chain risks for local PCB enterprises.The vitality of the ecosystem is also reflected in the “strong breakout” of high-energy, disruptive projects.In the showroom of Chip Jun De Technology (Anhui) Co., Ltd., Yu Yuying holds a piece of IC carrier board the size of a fingernail, as if holding a piece of art.“This is the core material for chip packaging, equivalent to the ‘skeleton’ and ‘nerve hub’ of the chip, characterized by high density and high precision, with a very high technical threshold. Previously, over 95% of the market for this product was monopolized by companies from Japan, South Korea, and other countries and regions,” Yu Yuying said.Chip Jun De Technology is the only IC carrier board manufacturer in Anhui Province, which settled in Guande in June 2023, filling the gap in the province’s key packaging materials segment.“Although we are a new company established for more than two years, our core team has 15 to 30 years of professional experience and is proficient in all core technologies for IC carrier board production. It is precisely Guande’s mature electronic circuit industry environment, especially the stable and reliable environmental and energy guarantees, that provided the most valuable ‘soil’ for us to overcome key technologies and achieve successful mass production within a year and a half of the company’s establishment,” Yu Yuying said. Currently, Chip Jun De Technology has sent out over a hundred new products for sampling, with nearly half passing customer verification and gradually entering mass production, maintaining a month-on-month growth trend in current orders and continuously improving market recognition.A healthy industrial ecosystem is inevitably a living entity of new and old kinetic energy conversion and collaboration between large, medium, and small enterprises. As of now, Guande has gathered 92 electronic circuit enterprises, cultivated four benchmark companies among the “Top 100 Chinese PCB Enterprises” such as Yangsheng, Mutailai, Wanzheng, and Dayang, while also having 34 high-tech enterprises and 22 specialized and innovative small and medium-sized enterprises, with a total of over 1,100 authorized patents. The degree of industrial clustering remains the highest in Anhui Province.From “Policy Support” to “Innovation Highland”When the industrial cluster breaks through the 10 billion scale threshold, Guande’s driving engine begins to shift from factor input to innovation empowerment, from “policy support” to building an “innovation highland.”“When applying for ultra-long-term special national bond projects, government functional departments actively helped adjust the application strategy and promoted the acceleration of approval procedures, ultimately successfully obtaining millions in funding support, which is a great help for our plan to invest over ten million next year to purchase new equipment and expand capacity,” Yan Hao believes that the government’s “nanny-style” service is everywhere.From enterprise settlement to talent rooting, Guande solves the “worries” of enterprise development with “full-cycle service.” Spatially, 300,000 square meters of standardized factories achieve “plug-and-play,” and the 190,000 square meter Guanneng Electronic Industrial Park provides shared laboratories; financially, the government has introduced a “equipment financing lease” model to reduce enterprise equipment procurement costs; in terms of talent, the Yangtze River Delta Electronic Information Industry College collaborates with 11 universities to cultivate professional talent, with the 2024 PCB new technology training class covering 28 enterprises and over 150 key personnel, addressing “key small matters” such as employee children’s schooling and housing subsidies, allowing companies like Yangsheng Electronics to achieve “90% of employees relocating with the factory.”At the same time, facing competition from neighboring regions, Guande avoids the “scale war” and creates differentiated advantages through “digital breakthroughs.” Guande has built the province’s first industrial internet platform for the PCB industry, achieving order collaboration, equipment sharing, and energy consumption monitoring between upstream and downstream PCB factories, making the cluster’s “nervous system” smarter and more efficient. In July 2023, the Guande Economic Development Zone was successfully selected as a provincial-level digital transformation demonstration park. Subsequently, 15 million yuan of provincial-level digital transformation subsidy funds were fully and efficiently allocated to relevant enterprises, promoting 43 electronic circuit enterprises to implement digital transformation.The future of enterprises determines the future of the cluster. In the face of challenges from the global industrial chain restructuring and profit squeeze caused by rising raw material prices, Guande’s enterprises did not sit idly by but actively expanded into high value-added fields.The Guande Economic Development Zone is opening up new growth poles with “technological breakthroughs + market restructuring.” In the field of electronic components for new energy vehicles, they are continuously overcoming the technical barriers of high-temperature and high-voltage PCBs; focusing on the blue ocean of energy storage electronics, they are concentrating on developing corrosion-resistant solutions for special circuit boards; based on the strategic positioning of the G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor node city in the Yangtze River Delta, they are acquiring higher-level resources with an open and collaborative development mindset, relying on the G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor’s technology achievement transformation fund to precisely invest in the Chip Jun De Technology IC carrier board project, achieving breakthroughs in the localization of storage chip packaging substrates, gathering tremendous power for industrial transformation and upgrading. (Anhui Economic Daily Reporter Deng Jiuping, Niu Hai, Chen Zonghe)
Interview Notes
From a silent “industrial wasteland” to a booming “investment card,” from the “physical gathering” of enterprises to the full-chain “ecological cultivation,” from relying on preferential “policy support” to endogenous growth in an “innovation highland,” the billion-dollar leap of the Guande PCB industrial cluster reveals a simple yet profound truth: a true industrial cluster is not merely a simple aggregation of enterprises. It begins with a wastewater treatment plant that can backstop enterprises and earn their trust, is formed by a tightly interlinked and self-controllable industrial chain, and ultimately transforms into a collaborative, symbiotic, and positively cyclical innovation ecosystem. This has allowed a billion-dollar “industrial dragon” to powerfully leap from the once silent land.
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Source / Anhui Economic Daily Anhui Economic Network
Editor / Shi Dalong Proofreader / Li Shuxin Reviewer / LiLiang
