The county-level city of Zhangjiagang in East China's Jiangsu province was ranked second in China in promoting industrial internet development. [Photo by Qu Liangbin for chinadaily.com.cn]

The county-level city of Zhangjiagang in East China's Jiangsu province was ranked second in China in promoting industrial internet development, according to a report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology during the Digital China Summit in Fujian on April 26.

The report was based on four criteria: infrastructure construction, fusion application, industrial ecology, and development environment. Jiangsu's Kunshan was ranked first on the list.

In recent years, Zhangjiagang has beefed up efforts to promote the industrial internet and digitalization, and accelerate the integration of the internet with manufacturing.

In 2019, Tencent Cloud, the cloud computing arm of internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd, partnered with Zhangjiagang to set up an industrial cloud base, which helped promote the high-quality development of the city's industrial development.

The first phase of the project was launched in June last year. Strategic cooperation ties forged with 52 local enterprises such as Jiangsu Shagang Group, and Dow Chemical Company have helped introduce industrial applications and promote the high-quality development of these enterprises.

Local authorities said that intelligent manufacturing has played a key role in boosting the city's industrial transformation and upgrading. Statistics show that the city invested nearly 30 billion yuan ($4.63 billion) and launched nearly 300 projects related to intelligent manufacturing sector from 2016 to 2020, and the city enabled 500 companies to migrate to cloud-based platforms during the same period.