Surrounding the leading enterprises, more enterprises on the same industrial chain have been invited into the industrial concentration zone, thus bringing forth the industrial accumulative effect. By the end of 2010, the Xiamen Torch Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone, Torch (Xiang'an) Industrial Zone and Xiamen Taiwan Sci-Tech Enterprises Incubation Center had registered 370 enterprises of scale and realized annual gross industrial output of 82.35 billion yuan ($13.07 billion). By the end of 2010, about 75.4 percent of the enterprises of scale had been in the three major industries, namely, electronics, machine building and chemical engineering, and realized a gross industrial output of 276.93 billion yuan ($43.96 billion), accounting for 81.9 percent of the city's total industrial growth. The 13 industrial chains with output value of more than 10 billion yuan ($1.59 billion) realized total industrial output value of 235.92 billion yuan ($37.45 billion), accounting for 64.3 percent of the city's total industrial output value.

Indigenous innovation

In recent years, Xiamen, endeavoring to build itself into a national innovation pilot city, has established the Xiamen Innovation Engineering and Technology Research Center and Xiamen Inventive Problem-Solving Studio. In addition, Xiamen has pushed forward the construction of a national pilot base of patent industrialization and a national demonstration city of intellectual property protection. With all these efforts, the number of hi-tech enterprises in Xiamen now takes up nearly half of the province's total. In 2010, Xiamen invested 5.098 billion yuan ($809.21 million) in research and development, much higher than the national and provincial average level. Xiamen SEZ has also launched guidelines on promoting the development of strategic and emerging industries, including new information technology, biological industry, new material, new energy, creative, genetic engineering and medicine and biological medicine.

Modern service industry

In the past three decades, Xiamen has been committed to developing its modern service industries, such as port logistics, tourism, exhibition and conference, finance and insurance. In 2010, the added value of the city's service industry increased to 100.23 billion yuan ($15.91 billion), with an average annual growth of 17.7 percent. In addition, the proportion of service industry growth in GDP increased from 21.9 percent in 1981 to 49.2 percent in 2010. Investment in the service industry steadily grew to 78.81 billion yuan ($12.51 billion) in 2010, 940.5 times greater than 1981, with an average annual growth of 26.6 percent.

Realizing the importance of Xiamen's port and drawing upon Xiamen Bay Harbor and Gaoqi International Airport, Xiamen has built up its own transportation system with harbors, railways, highways, airports and others. In 2010, Xiamen Port and Zhangzhou Port were integrated, and Xiamen Port was expanded to 12 harbor districts from eight and its deep-water coastline was extended by 27 km, which laid a foundation for further optimizing the function layout and achieving the coordinated development of different harbors.

Currently, Xiamen Port has 92 berths in use, with the capacity of each of the 64 exceeding 10,000 tons. Today's Xiamen Port has berths for various uses, such as container, coal and oil, with the largest capacity for an individual berth reaching 150,000 tons. In 2010, Xiamen Port realized goods throughput of 139.305 million tons and container throughput of 5.824 million standard containers, ranking 20th in the world.

Xiamen Airport, an important aviation hub connecting Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea, has become one of the country's top 15 airports. With a total of 172 inter-city airlines and postal airlines covering the whole country, Xiamen Airport has been listed as China's top five hub ports by the State Post Bureau.

There are railway lines connecting Xiamen with Fuzhou and Longquan in Fujian Province, Shenzhen in Guangdong Province and Yingtan in Jiangxi Province. A high-speed rail line opened in 2010 linking Xiamen to Fuzhou, signaling Xiamen's strategic position as an important railway hub on the west bank of the Taiwan Straits. Xiamen now has a modern communication network consisting of programming-controlled telephone, mobile communication, digital data and image-text transmission.

In the past 30 years, Xiamen has endeavored to build itself into an important and attractive center for trade and business in the southeast coast of China with a beautiful environment. To meet this goal, Xiamen SEZ has boosted consumption and its market. With the construction of large-scale commercial facilities and increasing inbound investment, large retailers both at home and abroad have entered Xiamen, including Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Lotus and Tianhong, and consumer goods sales have witnessed rapid growth in the past three decades, exceeding 10 billion yuan ($1.59 billion) in 1997, 20 billion yuan ($3.17 billion) in 2003 and 40 billion yuan ($6.35 billion) in 2007 and 68.5 billion yuan ($10.87 billion) in 2010, with an average annual growth of 20.8 percent.

During the past three decades, the financial market in Xiamen has been expanding continuously and boasts domestic and overseas financial institutes, and incorporated and unincorporated financial institutes. A mature and fit financial system has been formed in Xiamen, being administered by the People's Bank of China, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, China Securities Regulatory Commission and China Insurance Regulatory Commission. By the end of 2010, the city had recorded 34 financial institutes, including policy banks and domestic and overseas-invested banks, with local currency deposit balance increasing to 396.18 billion yuan ($62.88 billion) in 2010, or 776.1 times that of 1981, showing an average annual growth of 25.8 percent. Local current loans balance increased to 316.51 billion yuan ($50.24 billion) in 2010, 478.4 times greater than in 1981, with an average annual growth of 23.7 percent.

Xiamen has propelled its conference and exhibition industry. The city now has a slew of venues of 10,500 square meters for exhibition, including the International Exhibition Center and the Culture and Art Center. A batch of conferences have chosen Xiamen as their host city, such as China International Fair for Investment and Trade, China Xiamen Machinery and Electronics Exhibition, China International Xiamen Stone Fair and the Cross-Straits (Xiamen) Culture Industries Fair. In 2010, a total of 147 exhibitions and trade fairs and 1,369 conferences were held in Xiamen. The Xiamen Software Park has attracted a batch of Taiwan-invested software companies, animation game and integrated circuit design firms. In addition to holding the Xiamen International Animation Festival, the Xiamen Software Park has also become the National Animation Industry Base and the National Talents Training Base for Software and Integrated Circuit.

As China's famous tourist destination, Xiamen has been bolstering the development of its oceanic tourism products, including cruises, yachting and boating. Xiamen has become a leading player in the country's sea tourism by promoting tours across the Taiwan Straits. By the end of 2010, Xiamen, with 58 hotels above three stars, had received 30.26 million tourists, with gross business revenue of 38.39 billion yuan ($6.09 billion). It has received 1.628 million overseas travelers, with foreign exchange earning of $1.09 billion.