(Yicai) Sept. 21 -- The third annual Shanghai Talent+ Summit has kicked off with a bang, attracting over 200 intended overseas projects.

The summit, which includes a job fair and entrepreneurial training, started yesterday, and lured more than 200 potential foreign investment projects in the eastern city, as well as over CNY5 billion (USD685.2 million) in intended investments, Yicai learned. Almost 8,120 projects from around the world are taking part in an innovation and entrepreneurship contest during the four-day event.

In the past three years, Shanghai had the largest talent reserves in the country, and last year, the group made up over 10 percent of the nation's total, according to recruitment platform Liepin’s Big Data research institute.

Still, Shanghai has been making strides in attracting more high-quality talent in recent years. It has launched a special program for cultivating talent in the three major sectors of integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine. It is also actively preparing a batch of future industries to encourage young people to start their own businesses. Over the past five years, the total number of talent in Shanghai increased by 990,000 to reach 6.75 million people, according to public data.

Shanghai’s policy support targeting robotics is quite strong, Peng Zhihui, co-founder and chief technology officer of Zhiyuan Innovation Technology, told Yicai. Many of the Shanghai-based robot maker's upstream suppliers are local firms. The eastern megacity also boasts a lot of advantages as the firm's technologies will be used in the field of new energy in the future, he added.

After six months since choosing Shanghai’s Pudong district as the company’s location, Zhiyuan aims to commercialize its products in the second half of next year in the sector of industrial manufacturing.

When Li Yifan decided to return to China after founding Hesai Technology, a developer of LIDAR technologies used in smart cars, with two friends in Silicon Valley he was eyeing opportunities in China's autonomous driving market. The firm's listed arm Hesai Group is "China's first LIDAR stock" as the company went public on the Nasdaq in February.

Talent attracts startups. Insilico Medicine, an AI-driven biotech company founded in the United States in 2014, established a branch in Shanghai in 2019 while setting up research and development teams. Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and chief executive of Insilico, said to Yicai that Shanghai is one of the fastest-growing cities in China. Shanghai is quite similar to Boston in the US, Basel in Switzerland, and other global core hubs for biomedicine, so if Insilico wants to earn a top ranking in its segment, it needs to have a positioning in Shanghai, he added.

A great number of hardcore achievements, innovative firms, and leading talent with global influence will be emerging in Shanghai's fields of future health, intelligence, energy, and materials, Wu Jincheng, director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, said during the summit. This will generate industrial clusters that make the megacity an important pillar to lead global science and technology reforms and industrial transformation, Wu added.

Editors: Xu Wei, Emmi Laine