As of 2021, Japan had become Suzhou's third-largest source of foreign investment and funded a total of 2,973 companies in the city, with its direct investment in terms of actual use reaching $13.64 billion, accounting for 53.9 percent of the provincial total. SIP, SND and Kunshan have developed into the hubs for Japanese companies while Changshu, Xiangcheng district and Wuzhong district are seeing increasing investment from Japan.
Daikin founded a new R&D center in Suzhou last year, which is located in SIP and scheduled to finish construction in two years. Headquartered in Japan, Daikin set up its first branch in Suzhou over 20 years ago. The sales of its three air-conditioning companies in the city amounted to around 10 billion yuan last year.
Daikin founded a new R&D center in Suzhou last year.
Established 20 years ago, Mitsubishi Chemical Performance Polymers (China) Co., Ltd. in SND specializes in high-performance polymers and has some 120 employees. In 2021, its output value reached 357 million yuan. The company will now focus on automobile, semiconductor, high polymer material and food, and introduce automotive R&D production lines in SND, developing high-performance elastomer used in cars.
It is known that Japan mainly invests in such fields as automobile and parts, equipment manufacturing, electronics and communication, biomedicine, fine chemicals, etc. in Suzhou. Currently, there are a total of 44 Japanese Fortune 500 companies with 172 projects across the city.
Japan is not only an important source of foreign investment of Suzhou, but also its major trading partner. Statistics show that Japan was Suzhou's six-largest trading partner last year: the total export-import volume between them expanded 12 percent year-on-year to $33.56 billion, accounting for 8.6 percent and 49.8 percent of the city's total imports and exports and the export-import volume between Jiangsu province and Japan, respectively.
