The city of Shanghai in East China is stepping up its efforts to boost the development of its integrated circuits and software industries – and in order to do so it recently rolled out a series of measures, according to the Shanghai Municipal Development & Reform Commission.

Based on these initiatives, Shanghai will support the IP and software industries in key areas – recruitment, business start-ups, financing, R&D and applications, collaborative innovation in the Yangtze River Delta region and in industrial management. The measures took effect on Jan 1 and will be valid for five years.

Shanghai has continued to increase its support for the IC and software industries in recent years. The municipal government issued comprehensive support policies in 2000, 2012 and 2017 respectively, which strongly promoted the expansion of the two sectors.

The latest measures are said to give more support to the core links of the industrial supply chain – including manufacturing, equipment and the key materials for IC – as well as for basic software, industrial software and emerging technology software. 

The scale of Shanghai's IC industry has grown rapidly, with revenue increasing from 118 billion yuan ($18.63 billion) in 2017 to 250 billion yuan in 2021, an average annual growth rate of more than 20 percent. The number of listed enterprises in the sector on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Science and Technology Innovation Board reached 23 by the end of last year. 

The revenue generated by the city's software and information services industries has maintained double-digit growth for many years, with the number of employees engaged in the industry in the city currently at around 580,000.