A total of 43 Shenzhen enterprises entered the list of 100 leading digital trade enterprises in Guangdong Province for 2022, accounting for nearly half of the total, according to the list recently released by the provincial commerce department.

Twenty-three enterprises, including Huawei and ZTE, entered the information technology category. Tencent, CMGE and three other companies were included in the culture and entertainment category.

Twelve local companies including TOMTOP were in the digital trade platform category, and three enterprises including Dashine Electronics were selected in the R&D and design category.

Shenzhen’s imports and exports of digital trade services totaled US$48.96 billion in 2021, with an average annual growth rate of 18.4% during the 2019-2021 period, official statistics showed.

According to the data from the municipal commerce bureau, Shenzhen has so far developed one national intellectual property service export base, one national language service export base and two provincial digital service export bases.

In 2021, the added value of Shenzhen’s core digital economy industry exceeded 900 billion yuan (US$126.36 billion), accounting for 30.5% of the city’s GDP. The city ranked first among large and medium-sized cities in China in both its industry’s scale and its share in GDP, statistics showed.

China’s digital economy grew to 45.5 trillion yuan in 2021, ranking the second in the world. By the end of 2021, China had built and opened 1.425 million 5G base stations, the largest 5G network in the world, according to a report released at the 2022 China Internet Conference, which opened in Shenzhen on Tuesday.

The conference has become an influential internet and digital economy event in the Asia-Pacific region since its first edition in 2002. This year marked the first time that the conference was held in Shenzhen.