5,200 German firms do business in China
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit on Tuesday to Shenyang in Northeast China's Liaoning Province, a traditional industrial manufacturing base and a focal point of the country's efforts to upgrade its manufacturing sector, points to a key area of future cooperation between China and Germany, analysts said.
Despite recent China-EU trade tensions, the German chancellor has been focusing on cooperation with China, analysts pointed out, adding that the potential for more cooperation in manufacturing is enormous, despite Germany's already sizeable business presence in China.
Merkel's Shenyang trip follows her Beijing visit, where she held talks with Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, and witnessed the signing of business deals worth $15 billion.
In Shenyang, the German chancellor visited the China Industrial Museum and a plant of the German automobile giant BMW before flying back to Germany, according to media reports.
This marks Merkel's first visit in her nine years as German chancellor to China's northeastern region, where manufacturing has historically been a key sector and is undergoing a transition.
The city, which hosts the China-Germany Equipment Manufacturing Industrial Park (CGIP), is an increasingly popular investment destination for German companies like BMW.
Aside from BMW, which invested about 30 billion yuan ($4.55 billion) to build a factory there in 2010, the industrial park also hosts nearly 30 German companies involved in automobiles, machinery, electrical power and equipment and other sectors, according to the CGIP website.
Eye on Chinese market
"Merkel's Shenyang visit was aimed at highlighting a strong area of cooperation between China and Germany, which is industrial manufacturing," said Zhang Wanqiang, director of the Institute of Economics under the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences.
The visit also shows that Merkel has her eye on the vast Chinese market for industrial equipment and intends to open more opportunities for German companies, Zhang told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Advanced industrial equipment manufacturing, particularly for intelligent equipment like industrial robots, is a booming sector in China that has great growth prospects. The 21st Business Herald newspaper estimated that the sector would be worth more than 1 trillion yuan by 2020.
Shenyang is also expected to produce industrial robots and parts that will generate more than 20 billion yuan in revenue in 2017, the newspaper reported.
And that is what Merkel is aiming at, Zhang said, adding that "industrial manufacturing will be the focus of future China-Germany cooperation because it's an area where the two sides can really complement each other and ultimately benefit from each other."
Chen Fengying, a research fellow at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, also said cooperation in the industrial manufacturing sector "fits right into" the two countries' key development plans.
"Germany's 'Industrial 4.0' strategy and China's 'Made in China 2025' are basically heading in the same direction," Cheng told the Global Times Tuesday. "With Germany's advanced technologies in industrial manufacturing and China's vast market potential with its industrial transformation and upgrade, there is definitely a lot the two sides can do together."
The two countries have made linking their respective development plans for industrial manufacturing a top priority on their bilateral agenda, a point also highlighted during Merkel's trip to Beijing.
Cheng also said China and Germany can cooperate on projects in a third country through China's OneBelt and One Road initiative, which is expected to bring a host of investments in countries along the path.
As of February, China had approved 9,059 German investment projects, according to the Chinese Economic Herald. German investments in China were worth 26 billion euros, and 5,200 companies do business in China. Some 65 percent of them plan to expand, the newspaper reported in February.
