The 2026 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Informal Leaders’ Meeting will be held in Shenzhen in November. After Shanghai and Beijing, Shenzhen became the third city in China to host the APEC Leaders’ Informal Meeting. The Asia-Pacific business community actively participated in the conference. For them, hosting APEC in China and holding the summit in Shenzhen is a strategic opportunity that cannot be missed. As the conference is approaching, one question that the outside world is concerned about is: what kind of signal will this city, known for its "speed", send to the 21 economies.
Recently, Zhou Xing, Vice Chairman and Public Affairs Managing Partner of PwC China, accepted an exclusive interview. From the platform value of APEC to the sample significance of Shenzhen, to the industrial changes in the artificial intelligence era and the layout logic of multinational enterprises, her answer revolved around three clues: how to be seen as open, how to grow capabilities, and how to achieve win-win cooperation.
1. As Vice Chairman and Public Affairs Managing Partner of PwC China, how do you view the opportunities and value brought by APEC in China in 2026? What role does Shenzhen play in this?
APEC covers a population of approximately 3 billion, and the total GDP of the 21 member economies is US$61.4 trillion, accounting for 61.6% of the world. Over the past three decades, APEC has reduced the average regional tariff from 17% to around 5%, and the scale of trade has increased several times. In my opinion, it has already surpassed ordinary dialogue mechanisms and is a typical representative of win-win global cooperation.
This year's APEC has the theme of "Building an Asia-Pacific Community and Promoting Common Prosperity" and focuses on the three priority areas of openness, innovation and cooperation. In my opinion, these three priority areas are the specific paths for win-win cooperation: openness is the foundation, innovation is the driving force, and cooperation is the method. APEC China Year not only provides politicians and entrepreneurs from various countries with a window to perceive the Chinese market, but also promotes a higher level of institutional opening as the home venue, allowing consensus to be implemented into projects, rules and replicable experience. Shenzhen’s role can start from the “Shenzhen historical characteristics”.
The APEC Leaders' Informal Meeting was held in Shenzhen for the third time in China after Shanghai and Beijing. What started as a border town more than 40 years ago has grown to a GDP of nearly 4 trillion yuan today. This path has been achieved through openness, cooperation, and deep connections with the Asia-Pacific market. In 2025, Shenzhen's imports and exports will be 4.55 trillion yuan, with export volume "33 consecutive championships", and high-tech product imports and exports will be 1.4 trillion yuan, accounting for 30.7% of the city's foreign trade; Shenzhen ranks first in the country in the "open development" dimension in the "City of Opportunity 2026" released by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and is included as a case city of "Global High-tech Products Hub".
Therefore, Shenzhen is not only a display window, but also a test field for rule docking and a converter for the flow of elements. We hope that through this APEC China Annual Meeting, China and Shenzhen’s opening-up practices will be transformed into judgments that the global business community can perceive and make decisions on.
2. In the era of artificial intelligence, what are the special changes in Shenzhen and the Greater Bay Area, and what opportunities do they contain that deserve attention?
The 11 cities in the Greater Bay Area are positioned as one of the most open and economically dynamic regions in the country, and are also hubs for domestic and international dual circulation. Its form is polycentric, differentiated, complementary and synergistic.
Starting from 2021, PwC will continue to observe these 11 cities. That year, the Greater Bay Area ranked first overall in dimensions such as urban resilience; and the 2026 report shows that technological innovation, open development, and digital intelligence empowerment have significantly improved. Shenzhen's technological innovation rose to third in the country, and open development and green and low carbon ranked first. Behind this is the growth momentum brought about by the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry and AI empowering traditional industries and urban development.
My judgment is: What is scarce in the AI era is the engineering ability to put intelligence into the physical world. Models will converge, and value and profits will flow to scenarios, supply chains, and where engineering agglomerates.
In the Greater Bay Area, most smart hardware components are available within 50 kilometers, and prototypes take days. Trial and error are easy, and iterations are fast. Supply chain density provides basic support, cross-border trade introduces global demand, urban governance provides new scenarios, and there is flexible institutional space. This is a rare testing ground for the implementation and iteration of AI technology in the world.
AI amplifies China’s advantages of complete manufacturing categories, rich data, and rapid iteration. The value of AI must ultimately be realized in the scene.
3. The global industrial chain is being restructured, and the incremental investments of multinational companies are concentrated in strategic emerging industries. In your opinion, what are the long-term development directions of the Greater Bay Area? In what ways should enterprises participate to achieve win-win cooperation?
Currently, with the triple pressures of tariff adjustment, supply chain restructuring, and technology iteration, cross-border investment is increasingly concentrated in a few regions and key areas. The core change behind this is that the logic of corporate investment location selection shifts from looking at costs to looking at supplier networks, engineer conditions, scene density, etc.
Take technological innovation as an example. The Greater Bay Area gathers 1/7 of the country's high-tech enterprises and more than 1/3 of PCT international patent applications. Shenzhen leads the country in R&D investment intensity, and the "Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou" technology cluster ranks first in the world. The underlying capability that enterprises can truly obtain here is the engineering capability to turn concepts into prototypes and prototypes into mass production.
Manufacturing is the specialty of the Greater Bay Area. Within the Shenzhen Wanhui “One-Hour Industrial Circle”, 90% of the components for a mobile phone can be obtained nearby. The processes, management and supplier organization methods of mature production lines are being deposited into replicable and transferable knowledge assets in the form of a "mother factory".
The consumer market has shifted from "selling products" to "verifying new products", with fine stratification of demand and fast feedback. Capabilities such as new product definition and private domain operations can be precipitated here.
Green transformation traces back from green power procurement and carbon footprint to zero-carbon parks. The Greater Bay Area provides a complete verification scenario and also meets the real needs of the Asia-Pacific market.
I suggest that multinational companies upgrade their investment perspectives: first, position the Greater Bay Area as a "global capability site" to undertake R&D, engineering, supply chain and scenario verification, rather than just a manufacturing base. The second is to enter through "scenario co-creation" and jointly develop with local enterprises, supply chains and urban application scenarios to form capabilities faster than simply building a factory. The third is to make good use of the dividends of the open system, design the compliance structure for cross-border data, intellectual property rights, and talent flows in advance, and transform institutional differences into competitiveness.
Multinational enterprises leverage their brand and global network advantages, and the Greater Bay Area provides engineering, supply chain and scenario support. Both parties cultivate capabilities through cooperation and co-creation, and then use these capabilities to serve and empower the world.
4. In your opinion, after the APEC China Year, in what aspects can Shenzhen play a greater role in win-win cooperation in the Asia-Pacific?
Among the four major bay areas in the world, New York is good at finance, San Francisco is good at technology, and Tokyo is good at high-end manufacturing. The uniqueness of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is that there is no breakpoint between innovation and mass production, and Shenzhen is the most concentrated section of this chain. The dividends brought by APEC will not only be released for a few days during the meeting, but will continue to be released after the meeting; this meeting will also turn a one-time home venue into a normalized cooperation interface.
I believe that Shenzhen will play a greater role as a link and hub in three aspects in the future:
The first is the hub of hard technology industrialization. Many economies in the Asia-Pacific have technology and markets, but what they lack is the engineering capabilities from prototype to mass production. Shenzhen can open up its supplier network, engineering and production line capabilities and jointly develop with regional enterprises to connect "where technology breakthroughs are made" and "where products are mass-produced".
The second is the pioneer area of institutional opening. Cross-border data, trade facilitation, and mutual recognition of professional qualifications can be piloted in Qianhai and Hetao. Each step forward in mutual recognition of rules will reduce the cost of cross-border operations for enterprises.
The third is a permanent platform for industrial dialogue. After APEC, Shenzhen can undertake more industry docking, standards discussions and inter-city exchanges, and fix the annual mechanism so that companies can find projects, partners and orders here every year.
With its continued opening up and development, Shenzhen is becoming one of the important sources of common development and value innovation in the Asia-Pacific region.
It is foreseeable that as the summit approaches, the Asia-Pacific business community will only pay more attention to Shenzhen. What makes this city particularly attractive is that it always opens its doors to the world - anyone who is willing to come will find opportunities here; and those who have come want to come again.
