Shanghai leads STAR Market listings nationwide
Editor's note:
China is cultivating the development of new quality productive forces, referring to growth of higher quality driven by breakthrough innovations and comprehensive sustainability. Let's check out how businesses in Shanghai, which is base to many high-tech companies, fare on this route.
The major exhibition hall of United Imaging in its headquarters in Jiading District.
Shanghai has emerged as the national leader in listings on the Shanghai STAR Market, with a total of 91 companies listed by the end of April. This achievement underscores the city's commitment to fostering innovation, particularly in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), biomedicine and chip development.
The STAR Market, often compared to the Nasdaq, has proved to be a powerful tool for boosting the growth of listed companies.
"Listing on the STAR Market has accelerated our development and enhanced our global competitiveness, allowing us to invest heavily in next-generation product creation," said Xue Min, chairman of United Imaging, at the company's headquarters on Friday.
United Imaging, which is based in Jiading District, started listing on the Nasdaq-style STAR Market in August of 2022.
The company which develops and manufactures high-performance advanced medical imaging and radiotherapy equipment, life science instruments, and conducts researches on artificial intelligence, chips and robots, has a market value more than 100 billion yuan by Friday.
By April, the total market value of Shanghai-based companies listed on the STAR Market had reached a staggering 1.16 trillion yuan (US$161.1 billion), topping the rankings across all regions in China.
The STAR Market's role in facilitating capital acquisition has been instrumental in accelerating the commercialization of scientific research results and propelling companies with core technologies onto a high-quality growth.
A United Imaging production facility in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province.
STAR is a top-level platform for medical tech firms, like United Imaging, to issue fundraising and do business expansion and merge and acquisition, said Chen Zhu, chief analyst of health-care and medical industry of CITIC Securities.
"M&A activity is a crucial step for medical equipment companies to achieve scale, a strategy employed by many leading international players," Chen said on Friday.
United Imaging has 11,000 employees and has developed over 190 hardware or software products.
By April, the company's products cover over 70 countries and regions, including many Belt and Road regions. In 2023, its overseas income reached 1.68 billion yuan, a 50 percent growth from a year earlier.
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