(Yicai Global) May 26 -- Small- and medium-sized Chinese companies based in Shanghai’s southern Fengxian district have blossomed in recent years thanks to local policy support.

Shanghai Shenli Technology shrank the size of its fuel cells while doubling their performance between 2018 and 2021, Dai Wei, the general manager of the Chinese new energy high-tech firm, told Yicai Global. Fuel cells with a power generation capacity of 1 kilowatt were priced at CNY20,000 (USD2,835) in 2016, while they now cost only CNY2,000 (USD285), he added.

In recent years, Fengxian has introduced a series of policies to help support SMEs, including simplifying their settlement process and providing financial aid to high-tech companies in the biomedicine, new energy vehicle, digital economy, and new chemical material industries.

Hydrogen-powered commercial vehicles will drive the construction of China’s hydrogen refueling station network, eventually promoting the popularization of hydrogen-powered cars, Dai said.

As the production of hydrogen vehicles increases, the price of proton-exchange membranes, an expensive raw material for hydrogen fuel cells, will decline with mass production, making hydrogen fuel cells even cheaper than combustion engines and lithium-ion batteries, he said.

Through the multiple annealing and looping based amplification cycles technology, Yikon Medical’s unit in Fengxian achieved the pipeline-style testing of almost 1,000 types of rare diseases and cut screening costs to several thousand Chinese yuan from the tens of thousands, said Ren Jun, chief technical officer at the biomedicine firm.

Yikon Medical finished the genetic blocking of monogenic disorders through an embryo screening technique, directly helping more than 10,000 families give birth to healthy children. It plans to finish applying for an initial public offering on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-style Star Market by the end of this year.

The upgrade of smart vehicle consumption has raised the requirements for high-efficiency new products, said Chen Zhongming, co-founder of leading Chinese smart driving testing system provider Kunyi Electronics, which is also based in Fengxian. To tackle this issue, Kunyi proposed the concept of cluster testing to help carmakers finish trials in a high-efficiency and low-cost way.

Kunyi boasts famous companies in carmaking and related industries as clients, including Huawei Technologies, Nio, Xpeng Motors, BYD, SAIC Motor, and Contemporary Amperex Technology. It had a compound growth rate of 50 percent during the three years of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Editor: Futura Costaglione