Ready for the big league

The company also plans to ramp up its workforce in the new area and will soon have 300 to 400 employees in Lanzhou, comprising technicians from its headquarters in Hunan province and blue-collar workers from the local labor market.

Apart from wooing domestic investors, the city is also exploring options to attract more foreign companies.

Yuan says that the city is trying to revitalize its position in the old Silk Road and working to export more products from East China through its railway network. It will also play a key role in connecting the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and other countries in the Central Asian region.

The new Gansu JOY Agricultural Technology Co Ltd factory goes up. [Photo/China Daily]

With an eye on long-term and sustained foreign investment, the city has embarked on a massive infrastructure expansion program.

Liu Weiping, governor of Gansu, says that Lanzhou will look to extend its role as a logistics center linking central and western Asia by building more railways and highways. The province already has three major arterial railway lines intersecting at Lanzhou, to create the largest railway hub in western China.

"Infrastructure spending in the Lanzhou New Area, till date, has been around 24.6 billion yuan ($3.95 billion; 3.07 billion euros)," he says.

The new area has so far attracted 90 investment projects, with an investment volume of 70.7 billion yuan. Eight of those projects are up and running.

Green strides

Li Rui, director of the Lanzhou New Area Management Committee, says that the next step is to attract more enterprises, especially Fortune 500 and top Chinese firms.

"We will have strict screening criteria for enterprises, based on environmental protection and growth potential," Li says.

Most of the industries in the new area are those involved in equipment manufacturing, petrochemicals, biomedical, new materials and modern services.

Some of the top 500 companies in China, such as Geely Automobile and Sany Heavy Industries, have already set up plants or are building factories in the new area.

Song Chengwan, project engineer with Sany Heavy Industries, says that Sany choose the new area because of the convenient transportation links and huge market potential.

"For Sany, Gansu ranks among the top five provinces in terms of sales. Besides, with a center in Lanzhou and the convenient transportation links, we can easily cover the business in Xining, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Chengdu and Chongqing. The potential is unlimited," Song says.

The company is mainly involved in construction machinery manufacturing, covering more than 120 products.

Sany entered the new area in October 2010 to begin work on two projects - a concrete mixing equipment unit with initial investment of 530 million yuan, and a mechanical maintenance center, at an outlay of 100 million yuan. Production at both these units is likely to start early next year.