The Suzhou New Energy Vehicles Conference was held in Taicang, a county-level city administered by Suzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province on Jan 2. 

During the conference, which was aimed at promoting the building of Suzhou’s NEV industrial innovation cluster, deals for 142 projects with a combined investment of 91.6 billion yuan ($13.27 billion) were signed. 

The projects are related to fields such as automotive electronics, spare parts and intelligent connected vehicles, and three of them involve an investment of more than 5 billion yuan. 

Cao Lubao, the Party secretary of Suzhou, noted at the conference that the city will channel more resources towards the cultivation of enterprises that are engaged in the innovation of NEV over the next five years. 

Wang Xiangyuan, the Party secretary of Taicang, said at the conference that Taicang will continue its efforts to establish NEV innovation centers and strengthen cooperation with research institutes such as the Northwestern Polytechnical University to build a NEV industrial chain that covers design, research and development, manufacture, inspection and sales service.

Suzhou is currently home to 1,006 automobile enterprises above designated size that generated 438.2 billion yuan in output, up 15.2 percent year-on-year, in the January-November period last year. 

Specifically, 284 NEV enterprises above designated size generated an output value of 174.9 billion yuan during the same period.