North China's Shanxi province has been focusing on innovation and transforming and upgrading traditional industries in recent years. 

It has developed a group of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which occupy leading positions in certain industries and have core competitiveness. 

Shanxi Shangfeng Windbreak Wall Technology Co and Shanxi Haiyu Food Co, both based in the city of Jinzhong, provide noise control services for more than 50 percent of the national railways and own eight nationally advanced production lines for flour-made food, respectively. They are leaders in the domestic wind hazard control and flour-made food production industries. 

According to Xue Jiangzhao, director of the Shanxi Bureau for the Promotion of Small Business Development, by the end of 2020, Shanxi had cultivated 53 national-level SMEs aimed at market gaps and industrial bottlenecks to conduct research and business, and 105 such SMEs at the provincial level. 

The province has also been committed to expanding beyond traditional industries and focusing on 14 strategic emerging industrial clusters, which has attracted the attention of investors from across China.

"The government was sincere and provided us with factories, apartments, and a vast market. The contract was finalized in less than a month," said Li Lifeng, deputy general manager of Daxin Zhichuang Technology (Shanxi) Co, a service robot R&D and manufacturing company that came to Shanxi in 2020.

All 11 cities in Shanxi have introduced corresponding measures to attract new industrial investors and projects, with agreements for 3,124 investment promotion projects signed in 2020.

In the first quarter of this year, the growth in added value of the equipment manufacturing industry, industrial strategic emerging industries, and high-tech manufacturing industry in Shanxi was significantly higher than the provincial industrial growth rate.

As a good business environment is indispensable for the development of enterprises, Shanxi has continued to streamline the investment approval process and has increased financial support for SMEs.

For example, the time needed to approve engineering construction projects in the Shanxi Transformation and Comprehensive Reform Demonstration Zone has been reduced to 33 working days, said Dong Liang, deputy director of the zone's management committee.

"The government's support is obvious for my company's development," said Yang Xia, chairwoman of Shanxi Jinbo Bio-pharmaceutical Co. She also said that after the company set up operations in the zone, more than 50 million yuan ($7.73 million) in financial subsidies for innovative technological support had been given by the zone's management committee to the company in 2020. 

To date, the company has completed 39 patent applications and made three international achievements. It is expected to become an important global collagen industry base in the future, according to Yang.