Economic Watch: China's Guangxi stimulates real economy, deepens cooperation with ASEAN

NANNING, Dec. 10 (Xinhua) -- Wei Min, a civil servant in the city of Nanning, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has been living at a project site of Chinese leading new energy vehicle manufacturer BYD for weeks to help meet the needs of the company.

The project that Wei is working on is at an emerging industrial park in Nanning's Yongning District. Close to the surrounding inland ports, railways and expressways, the park is about 200 km away from the China-Vietnam border.

Connected with countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) by land and sea, Guangxi is a frontier and important window for exchanges and cooperation between China and the ASEAN countries.

Over the years, the region has accelerated its opening up to ASEAN, seizing opportunities brought by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), promoting China-ASEAN economic and trade cooperation, building cross-border industrial chains, and pushing forward the process of regional integration.

In the assembly workshop of Guangxi SUNLONG Automobile Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in the industrial park, technicians have been busy these days with a new energy-heavy truck to be launched soon. This year, the company exported buses to Thailand for the first time and its first batch of heavy trucks exported to ASEAN rolled off the line, achieving a new milestone.

"Our products have been exported to six countries, raking in more than 20 million yuan (about 2.9 million U.S. dollars) this year," said Zhou Jiwen, president of the company. "With the launch of new products, we aim to achieve an export value of more than 200 million yuan in 2023."

In recent years, Nanning has been making every effort to build industrial chains worth over 100 billion yuan in such areas as new energy, electronic information, metals, and new chemical materials, and promoting continuous optimization of industrial structure.

In the production workshop of Guangxi Mesda Group Co., Ltd., workers are busy welding, polishing, and assembling some crushing and screening equipment, which will soon be sold to overseas markets.

According to Huang Kanghua, chairman of the company, Mesda's products have entered the markets of Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and other ASEAN countries, playing an active role in the field of construction waste resource utilization, mining, and tailings treatment.

"Our export business in the ASEAN markets increased by 200 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2021," Huang said.

Since the beginning of this year, Nanning has launched investment in the new energy battery industry chain with BYD as the center and introduced five projects with a total output value of 50 billion yuan, said Lu Qing, head of the municipal bureau of industry and information technology.

Also, Nanning has actively cooperated with a number of leading enterprises in electronic information and photovoltaic industries whose production bases sit in ASEAN, Lu said.

"In the first 10 months of this year, Nanning's industrial investment hit a year-on-year increase of 74.1 percent, a record high in 21 years. The total amount and quality of industrial projects launched in Nanning have been significantly improved," Lu added.