More multinationals deepen ties with China as Qingdao Summit fuels global collaboration

The sixth Qingdao Multinationals Summit, which concluded Friday, has seen a notable influx of first-time participants, with 131 new representatives from multinationals joining the event - accounting for 23 percent of total attendees.

Themed "Multinationals and China: Connecting the World for Win-Win Cooperation," the three-day summit in the coastal city of Qingdao gathered representatives from a total of 465 multinational companies, featuring 135 Fortune Global 500 giants and 330 industry leaders spanning 43 countries and regions.

At the summit, Pablo Rodriguez-Gonzalez, general manager at IBARMIA, a Spanish machine tool manufacturer, said his company recently established a new showroom in Shanghai and plans to expand production capacity at its Chinese factory.

Attending for the first time, he expressed enthusiasm about sharing positive developments with his Chinese partners, highlighting the market's increasing contribution to the company's revenue growth.

"During the last 15 years, if we took the whole amount of sales orders in China, it's around 20 to 25 percent of our whole company income. This means that they perfectly know the potential of Chinese market and they perfectly know how important China is for our company," Rodriguez-Gonzalez said.

This year, companies from nine countries, including Vietnam and Egypt, took part in the summit for the first time, reflecting the summit's expanding global reach.

Notably, over half of the participating multinationals hail from emerging markets, highlighting their growing influence in the global economy.

Meanwhile, a rising number of multinational executives are leveraging the platform to gain direct insights into China and explore opportunities within its market.

Belinda Tanoto, chairman of Royal Golden Eagle China, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing her company’s renewed focus on the Chinese market.

"China remains one of the world's largest markets. We will definitely increase our investment in China and make it a key focus for our development," she said.

More multinationals deepen ties with China as Qingdao Summit fuels global collaboration

China aims to achieve secure and reliable supply of key core artificial intelligence (AI) technologies by 2027, with its industrial scale and empowerment level remaining among the world's forefront, according to a recent government action plan.

The plan, jointly issued by eight departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and the National Development and Reform Commission, outlines an ambitious push to deeply integrate AI with the manufacturing sector, foster new quality productive forces and comprehensively empower new industrialization. By 2027, the plan targets the deep application of three to five general-purpose large AI models in manufacturing, the development of specialized, full-coverage industry-specific large models, the creation of 100 high-quality industrial datasets, and the promotion of 500 typical application scenarios.

It also aims to cultivate two to three globally influential ecosystem-leading enterprises, a batch of specialized and sophisticated small and medium-sized enterprises, and a group of enabling service providers proficient in both AI technology and industry know-how.

Furthermore, China plans to build a world-leading open-source ecosystem, enhance security governance capabilities, and contribute Chinese solutions to global AI development.

The document outlines measures including promoting the coordinated development of AI chips' hardware and software, supporting innovations in model training and inference methods, fostering key industry-specific large models, and deeply embedding large model technology into core production processes.

The plan also emphasizes making breakthroughs in key technologies such as security protection for industrial model algorithms and training data protection.

China aims for secure, reliable supply of AI core tech by 2027