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In 1999, just after the completion of the first phase of Suzhou Industrial Park, it encountered a crisis.

This huge project led by Singapore is seen as a facade of China's reform and opening up. However, after its opening, not many companies have moved in.

Singaporeans were a little anxious, even Lee Kuan Yew was anxious, and even publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the park. In the end, they asked for a share adjustment. Share adjustment was just a euphemism. Everyone knew:

In fact, it is the major shareholder who wants to withdraw his investment.

The Suzhou people had no choice but to pay back the Singaporeans with real money, including principal and interest. Singapore’s equity in the park was reduced from 65% to 35%.

At that time, the domestic economy was in a recession and banks were short of money. Where to raise money for the subsequent construction of the park was a critical issue.

At this time, the central government stepped in and endorsed Suzhou Industrial Park with national credit, obtaining a loan from the China Development Bank. As a result, the environmental governance of Jinji Lake and the infrastructure construction of the park could proceed smoothly.

There is another more important reason that few people know, that is, the people of Suzhou are very concerned about the overall situation. Many farmers allowed the government to relocate first and pay later without receiving compensation, which greatly eased the payment pressure of the park.

In the second year after Singapore withdrew its investment, the park began to make a profit; three years later, all previous losses had been recovered, not to mention the appreciation of the park's land and housing prices.

I don’t know if Singaporeans regret it. By 2004, Suzhou’s GDP ranked fourth in the country. Suzhou people calculated that the total economic output of the park reached the level of Suzhou city at the beginning of its development:

They recreated a new Suzhou.

1

In September 2009, Suzhou's land prices shocked the real estate industry.

Greentown, which had just entered Suzhou, bought two plots of land in Shuanghu for 6.1 billion yuan. One of the plots had a floor price of more than 45,000 yuan per square meter. When Tomson Yipin was only selling for more than 60,000 yuan, this plot of land was truly worthy of its reputation:

The national land king.

These two pieces of land later became the Imperial Garden and Peach Blossom Spring projects.

They bring together all of Greentown's concepts and technical accumulation in luxury homes. Royal Garden is French-style, with 11 single-storey mansions in the project, strictly following the rules and paradigms of European neoclassicism, almost one-to-one, moving the French court to Suzhou;

The Peach Blossom Spring was almost entirely handcrafted. Greentown invited masters from the "Xiangshan Gang" to come out and recreate the Suzhou Garden. The cost per square meter of the two-story Chinese garden is more than that of an 800-meter skyscraper.

The prices of Yuyuan and Taohuayuan were beyond the imagination of many people. But what was even more surprising was that every time the project was launched, it was immediately bought up by entrepreneurs in Suzhou, and even the purchasing power of neighboring Shanghai had to retreat.

Everyone knows that Jiangsu and Zhejiang are rich in the people, but few people expected:

People in Suzhou are so rich.

You have to remember that was 2009, when the financial crisis was at its worst. As an industrial city based on foreign trade, Suzhou could not have been unaffected.

In fact, at the beginning of the financial crisis, Suzhou's population dropped by 20%, and important indicators such as total industrial output value, profits and taxes, profits, and income all showed a sharp decline.

The people of Suzhou were also very panicked. On the one hand, they took out 800 million yuan to reduce taxes and provide subsidies to enterprises in the park. On the other hand, they communicated with multinational companies in various ways to persuade them to move more production lines to Suzhou.

But these actions are just routine actions after all.

The fundamental reason why Suzhou was able to safely weather the global financial crisis was that they began to prepare for a rainy day several years ago.

2

In 2005, the leaders of Suzhou Industrial Park visited Singapore and accidentally heard about something in Singapore’s own One-North Technology Park:

We are raising mice vigorously.

Raising mice is to develop the pharmaceutical industry. Suzhou leaders suddenly realized that industrial parks can not only attract investment, but also take the initiative to cultivate industries.

Shortly after returning, Lin Xianghong, chairman of Suzhou Industrial Park’s own venture capital company, Sino-Singapore Venture Capital, received an order to set up a biotechnology park in the park.

The leaders had no choice but to entrust such a major project to a single company. Moreover, it was even more difficult to snatch food from Zhangjiang, Shanghai at that time. How could those pharmaceutical giants give up Shanghai?

People in Suzhou can only take another route.

Two years later, Suzhou Biotech Park BioBAY opened, and ten biotech companies moved in at once, all of which were relatively well-known startups. They also had one thing in common:

They all received angel investment from Suzhou.

When everyone was still using subsidies to attract investment, Suzhou people were already doing venture capital. Now everyone praises Hefei as a venture capital city, but in fact Suzhou was doing it decades ago. Suzhou established China's first market-oriented RMB mother fund, with a scale of RMB 1 billion.

When other cities build high-rise buildings, the park spends 1 billion:

Invested in many inconspicuous small companies.

Since 2005, Suzhou has used the same idea to develop semiconductor, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence industries. Many domestic and foreign scientists and entrepreneurs have received angel investment from Suzhou to turn their scientific research results into products.

From then on, this city was no longer just an industrial city, not just about assembling laptops and mobile phones, their eyes were on the stars and the sea.

More and more high-tech companies have noticed Suzhou and started to move their more technologically advanced departments to Suzhou. In 2009, a giant Ferris wheel was erected on the shore of Jinji Lake. By the end of the year, Suzhou residents calculated that foreign investment had reached $8.2 billion, a 1% increase over 2008.

After the financial crisis, Suzhou not only remained unscathed, but also gained a new life.

3

In March 2024, at the first land auction of the year, Greentown won the Z03 plot in Suzhou Shishan section with a total price of 828 million yuan. The floor price set a new record for the land king in Shishan section.

Two weeks later, Greentown acquired the Shuanghu plot for more than 3 billion yuan, with a floor price of 65,000 yuan per square meter, which was not only the highest price in Suzhou, but also the highest price in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Even in Hangzhou, Greentown had never acquired such expensive land.

The second piece of land acquired by Greentown is opposite to Yuyuan, in a familiar place, and it is still the familiar land king:

Fifteen years seemed like a dream.

As we all know, a few years after it won the title of the national land king in Suzhou, Greentown fell into a financial crisis and was on the edge of a cliff. At the most difficult time, it even had to hand over the Royal Garden and Peach Blossom Spring to others.

But now, after all the hardships, they are back. Not only did they survive the real estate crisis, they also fought back and are now the fourth largest developer in China.

Greentown has arranged its own top product lines for the two plots in Suzhou this time. Shuanghu is Rose Garden, one of Greentown’s most classic low-density products; the smaller Shishan plot introduces the “Lu” series, named Yilu. Within Greentown, the two projects are collectively called:

East Garden and West Pavilion.

The Rose Garden still follows the French architecture of the Imperial Garden fifteen years ago. Greentown will restore the roof of the Palace of Versailles and will also reproduce the gardens in eight famous French paintings in the Rose Garden. The background of Yilu is oriental classical aesthetics. From architecture to gardens, they are all traditional Suzhou techniques.

The current Suzhou market has not seen any amazing low-density projects for a long time. Both projects are low-density products with a small supply, so the price will definitely not be cheap.

4

I asked my friends at Greentown, how dare you take such expensive land and build such expensive houses when the real estate market is so depressed?

Their answer is, just look at the companies listed in Suzhou in recent years:

Especially the Science and Technology Innovation Board.

On April 23, 2019, a few months after Meng Wanzhou was detained by Canada, a company called Hubble Technology was quietly established. The parent company behind it is:

Huawei.

A few days after its establishment, Hubble spent 72 million yuan to subscribe to the shares of the semiconductor company SiRuiPu. SiRuiPu is a small chip factory in Suzhou that has been losing money for many years and has difficulty surviving. No one understands Huawei's investment.

Less than a month later, on May 16, 2019, the United States imposed its first sanctions on Huawei. Only then did everyone realize that Huawei wanted to support the domestic supply chain.

Sure enough, SiRuiPu soon became a core supplier of Huawei's 5G base station signal chain chips. In the second year, SiRuiPu's revenue took off, with a net profit of more than 70 million.

After SiRuiPu, Huawei has successively invested in more than a dozen companies, most of which are chip companies. In Huawei's investment map, the cities that appear most frequently are:

Suzhou.

Suzhou Canqin Technology, Suzhou Changguang Huaxin, Suzhou Nanochip... Suzhou's semiconductor industry, which has been silently nurturing for 20 years, has finally ushered in its moment of explosion.

We have to admit that Huawei has a very sharp eye. They know exactly which companies have real assets and which companies are just raising money in the name of technology. Companies that Huawei has taken a fancy to basically line up to go public and become star companies.

Take SiRuiPu as an example. Its market value was more than 160 billion when it went public, and Huawei’s return on investment was nearly 100 times.

If it weren't for the US sanctions and Huawei's support, these companies wouldn't have been exposed to the public so quickly. But everyone only sees their bright future, but not the difficulties Suzhou went through in incubating them.

For example, Naxin Micro, which also received investment from Huawei, was founded by three engineering students who came to Suzhou Industrial Park with their school bags in 2013. At that time, the chip industry was still an unpopular industry, and the park not only reduced rent, but also provided venture capital, supporting them all the way to a company with a maximum market value of over 20 billion.

In March 2021, after Lei Jun publicly announced Xiaomi's car-making plan, he immediately participated in the financing of several Suzhou chip companies. Now their products have appeared on the most popular Xiaomi SU7.

There are many such champion enterprises in Suzhou. There are more than 60 listed companies in Suzhou Industrial Park, and more than 20 of them are listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. The number is among the highest in the country, and most of them are semiconductor companies.

These companies are all engaged in hard technology. They never pursue the trend and are not well-known. Most of them are engaged in B-side business. Their products are not well known to the public, but they have strong technical content. The park is therefore called:

China's hardest "square kilometer".

In recent years, hard technology has become the hottest sector in the capital market, and the net worth of many entrepreneurs has skyrocketed as a result.

This way of getting rich quickly is popular among the people. Greentown's Rose Garden and Yilu are designed for them.

5

After fifteen years, Greentown and Suzhou finally met at the top.

In the past fifteen years, both cities and companies have experienced great changes.

Suzhou became the world's largest industrial city in 2021, but it has also been criticized for the relocation of foreign companies; Greenland's fate has been even more ups and downs, but no matter how difficult it is, they have never had unfinished buildings or reduced product standards.

There are two honors that Greentown values ​​most. One is the list of "Excellent Real Estate Product Power Enterprises", for which they have been ranked first for five consecutive years, and the other is the "Chinese Urban Residents' Satisfaction with Living" survey:

Greentown has been leading for 14 consecutive years.

Their reputation and credibility have therefore never been interrupted.

The same is true for Suzhou. Although people always say "there is heaven above and Suzhou and Hangzhou below", the people of Suzhou know:

The golden key to heaven can only be held in your own hands.

The withdrawal of Singaporeans and two financial crises were all successfully resolved by Suzhou people. The soft-spoken Suzhou people seem to be best at dealing with headwinds.

Back in 1992, Lee Kuan Yew originally wanted to build the industrial park in Pudong, and Suzhou was just a temporary addition to the itinerary, lasting only half a day.

The then mayor of Suzhou, Zhang Xinsheng, got on the stretched Mercedes that was picking up Lee Kuan Yew and used the more than 20 minutes from the hotel to the train station to try to persuade Lee Kuan Yew.

Lee Kuan Yew did not expect that Zhang Xinsheng could speak fluent English; nor did he expect that this young mayor was so well aware of Singapore's foreign exchange reserves, and every word he said touched his heart.

From that moment on, the balance of victory has tilted towards Suzhou.

Cherish Uncle Bao, and watch it