In the first half of the year, Dongguan's total fixed asset investment decreased by 1.2% year-on-year, with real estate development investment falling by 10.5%, but industrial investment increased by 13.8%. The photo shows the streetscape of Dalang Town, Dongguan. By leveraging industrial technology transformation to drive the upgrade of leading industry products, and implementing differentiated industrial layouts, Dongguan and even the Pearl River Delta regions are expanding their foreign trade with these core strategies. By early August, the economic data for the first half of the year in various parts of the Pearl River Delta have been released. Among the nine cities known as the "barometer" of China's foreign trade, in addition to Shenzhen, which continues to lead with its sustained advantages, the recent situation of Dongguan, which performed relatively poorly in 2023, has also attracted much attention. Overall: in the first half of 2024, Dongguan's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reached 568.68 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%. In the same period of 2023, Dongguan's GDP was 526.21 billion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of only 1.5%, ranking last in the province. The notion of the "world's factory" slowing down has since spread. The change from 1.5% to 5.3% means that among the 21 cities in the province, Dongguan's year-on-year growth rate ranks fourth, just behind Jieyang, Shenzhen, and Shanwei. Looking at the provincial situation, Guangdong's GDP in the first half of this year was 6,524.25 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.9%. Among them, Guangzhou's GDP was 1.43 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.5%. Shenzhen was 1.73 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.9%. Industrial production is the foundation of Dongguan's economic growth. Looking at the three industries: Dongguan's primary industry added value was 1.661 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 5.9%; the secondary industry added value was 331.078 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.1%; the tertiary industry added value was 235.941 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.6%. As the "main force" of economic development, Dongguan has about 14,000 large-scale industrial enterprises, and the role of enterprises with main business income of 20 million yuan and above over the years cannot be ignored. Specifically, in the first half of the year, the added value of large-scale industry in Dongguan was 251.336 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.0%. Behind this growth figure, it is actually driven by the so-called "five pillars and four specialties" leading industries in the area. Taking the electronic information manufacturing industry as an example, its growth rate of 19.9% far exceeds that of packaging printing, chemical manufacturing, and papermaking. Specifically, smartwatches, routers, 5G mobile phones, and integrated circuits are becoming the mainstay of Dongguan's export products. Their production volumes have increased by 135.8%, 96.1%, 33.4%, and 20.6% respectively. Industrial growth is positively cycling with investment, originating from the large-scale equipment renewal in a new round of large-scale equipment renewal, and industrial technology transformation is becoming a tool for many cities in the Pearl River Delta to explore investment opportunities, and Dongguan is no exception. In fact, although the total fixed asset investment in the city decreased by 1.2% in the first half of the year, compared with the 3.7% decrease in infrastructure investment and the 10.5% decrease in real estate development investment, its industrial investment still increased by 13.8% (industrial technology transformation investment increased by 23.0%). A related phenomenon worth noting is that after the Shenzhen Metropolitan Circle was elevated to a national strategy at the end of 2023, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou, which are located within the circle, as well as the Shenzhen-Shantou Special Cooperation Zone, have all achieved relatively ideal economic growth. In addition to Shenzhen and Dongguan, as an export-oriented economic city, Huizhou's total import and export value in the first half of the year was 185.24 billion yuan, reaching the highest point in history, and its 22.7% foreign trade growth rate in the Pearl River Delta is second only to Shenzhen. Among the various interpretations of this phenomenon, the distributed layout of the industrial belt and the inlaid statement have attracted more attention. From a geographical perspective, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou are forming a globally comprehensive, dense, and mutually collaborative electronic industry belt, and the first pillar industry of the three cities is the electronic information industry, which has all achieved double-digit growth in the first half of this year. Differentiated industrial layout is thus becoming one of the few core means for many city clusters in the Pearl River Delta to expand foreign trade. At the end of 2023, the "China Customs" magazine published a report on the competitiveness of urban foreign trade, pointing out that under the radiation and drive of central cities such as Shenzhen, the west and east banks of the Pearl River are forming a staggered layout of advanced equipment manufacturing and electronic information industry belts, and the similarity of export products (ESI) between the two regions has decreased from 58.9% in 2017 to 46.4% in 2022. The degree of homogenization has been greatly reduced, and the layout of foreign trade industries has been more optimized. The relatively favorable foreign trade environment and the distributed layout of industries are also the core driving force for a series of "turning from gloom to sunshine" in production and investment in Dongguan and other places. In fact, the reason why Guangdong's economic growth rate has been lower than the national average for the past two years is largely due to its high dependence on export trade, which is easily affected by the international trade environment and related sanctions. In the overall foreign trade situation of Guangdong in the first half of this year, benefiting from the overall recovery of the global consumer electronics industry, the Pearl River Delta achieved a total foreign trade value of 4.2 trillion yuan, accounting for 96.1% of the province, and also accounting for 19.8% of the national import and export total value (21.17 trillion yuan) in the same period. As one of the cities with the highest foreign trade dependency in China, Dongguan's foreign trade import and export in the first half of the year was 637.51 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.4%. This growth rate is considered to be of guiding significance to a certain extent. After the relevant growth rate turned positive in the fourth quarter of 2023, Dongguan's foreign trade is also gradually showing a trend of getting better quarter by quarter: a 0.6% increase in the first quarter, a 5.8% increase in the second quarter, and a 10% increase in June. In addition to the aforementioned series of improvements in internal and external environments, bonded logistics is also considered to be one of the key factors for Dongguan's foreign trade to turn from negative to positive. Thanks to the development of cross-border e-commerce and other industries, the city's bonded logistics import and export increased by 16.9% year-on-year, raising the overall foreign trade growth rate of Dongguan in the same period by 3.9 percentage points, accounting for 26.3%. Looking forward to the second half of 2024, under the influence of factors such as exchange rate factors and increased shipping costs, whether the foreign trade of the Pearl River Delta and cities such as Dongguan and Shenzhen can still maintain a strong position? In this regard, Professor Lin Jiang, the deputy director of the Hong Kong and Macao Pearl River Delta Research Center at Sun Yat-sen University, who has been paying attention to the economic development of Dongguan for many years, analyzed to the "Finance and Economics" reporter: On the surface, Dongguan's foreign trade data in the first half of the year is not bad, because there is a good increase in intermediate product trade with Southeast Asia and other regions, and electronic information products also show growth due to the seasonal factors of foreign importers replenishing inventory. However, it is worth noting: first, many local factories are moving outward, and the subsequent impact remains to be observed; second, the state of foreign trade merchants replenishing inventory may be unstable, causing the foreign trade to be more volatile. "Under multiple influences, some local enterprises are still relatively passive. They are in a state of 'if there is an order, they will do it, if there is no order, they can't do anything'."
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