Shenzhen set to overtake Silicon Valley in tech innovations

Shenzhen’s rise as a new hub for innovation is now drawing increasing numbers of expat entrepreneurs from the West.

Just two years ago, the Chinese city was already home to over a million foreigners, with the vast majority arriving from South Korea, Japan and India, as well as from the USA. Numbers have increased significantly from that point, with Shenzhen beginning to rival Shanghai and Beijing as an expatriate professional destination for hardware manufacturing as well as software innovations.

Long-term expat residents in Shenzhen, the majority of whom arrived to work in the tech sector, have watched its development from an average Chinese city to its rebirth as a 21st century hive of skyscrapers and traffic jams in the Chinese style. Its business district is now a hub for major Chinese hi-tech companies such as TenCent and DJI, and holds a total of 2,223 other tech-focused firms as well as three laboratories set up by Nobel Prize-winning scientists.

French entrepreneur Laurent Le Pen first arrived in Shenzhen eleven years ago and established himself in the city’s High-Tech Industrial Park. His initial business involved the design and production of wearable devices, but he’s now concentrating on smart healthcare devices. China, he says, is more than willing to adopt all the new technologies and now seems to be more innovative than the USA’s famous Silicon Valley. He believes China is now well positioned to take over from Silicon Valley as the world’s tech hub in the near future.

Another Shenzhen expat resident, Diego Antolini, has lived in the city for four years, spending the majority of his time training local manufacturers in the Longgaag and Baoan industrial districts to interact with businesses in the West. His take on the city is that the manufacturing industry’s going to continue to be very important as it’s now making the mechanical parts used to turn tech theory into reality. Although Shenzhen’s soaring land prices have exiled major manufacturers such as Huawei and ZTE to other Chinese cites, he believes the city will continue to lead the pack in designing and marketing new technologies.