Investment partners delivering development

Partnerships with leading investment companies have ensured Weifang Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone can more effectively identify industrial leaders, which officials believe to be the main forces to support the zone's long-term development.

According to An Bin, director of the zone's finance bureau, investment firms are more professional in identifying and evaluating top businesses in industries compared to governments.

After evaluating a series of surveys and studies, the zone established the investment company Weifang Hi-Tech Zone Guochuang Investment to launch a fund of funds, FOF, to attract investment.

Meanwhile, the zone has cooperated with fund management companies such as China Creation Ventures and Tsinghua Holdings Capital to launch structural funds.

"We are looking to partner with the best investment organizations so all projects in the zone are verified by capital investors," said Hu Jie, general manager of Guochuang Investment.

Beijing-based TSC Laser Technology Development is one of the companies attracted to the zone under the new investment attraction model.

The company specializes in three - dimensional printing technology. Its products are mainly used in fields such as aviation and aerospace. Headquartered in Beijing, the company has branches in Shenyang of Liaoning province, Xi'an of Shaanxi province and Tianjin.

TSC has been looking for new production sites to expand its operation capacity.

Under the efforts of the zone's administrative committee and Guochuang Investment, TSC's new production plant, with total investment of 700 million yuan ($101.11 million), was established in the zone.

"We spent more than one month in Beijing to collect information about TSC, for instance, financial performance and legal risks," said Fu Guangliang, executive director of Guochuang Investment.

A 465-page due diligence report was then provided to a management team of the FOF for further appraisal. The FOF team also helped build good connections between the government and TSC, so both parties had good understanding of relevant information.

Li Guangsheng, general manager of TSC Weifang, said as Weifang has long been supporting many leading manufacturing giants such as Weichai Power and Goertek with its qualified human resources, he believes it will be easier for the company to find technical professionals and the labor force it needs.

The TSC project, which started construction in March, will be put into production at the end of October. Its industrial output value is expected to be more than 20 million yuan in 2019, according to the company.

The scale of the fund managed by Guochuang increased to 16.2 billion yuan recently.

"In the last two months, the zone contracted 28 new projects with total investment of 17.28 billion yuan," said Dong Yulun, director of the zone's investment promotion bureau.