Shenzhen closed 2025 with a headline many in China will watch closely: gross domestic product of 38,731.8 billion yuan, a 5.5% gain that makes the city the fastest-growing of China’s four first-tier municipalities and puts it within striking distance of the 4-trillion-yuan milestone. The number matters less as a vanity metric than as a signal that Shenzhen’s innovation- and export-driven model is still delivering growth even as Guangdong province as a whole stumbles.
Guangdong reported GDP of 14.58 trillion yuan in 2025, up 3.9% — well short of the 5% target set at the year’s start and behind the national average. Industrial output across the province is only slowly recovering: value added for firms above the designated scale rose just 3.0%, far below the province’s stated ambition of roughly 6% growth. The result is a provincially lopsided recovery in which Shenzhen — and to a lesser extent Guangzhou — provide the bulk of incremental activity.
Shenzhen’s strength is concentrated in advanced manufacturing, innovation and trade. The city’s above-scale industrial gross output crossed 5.4 trillion yuan in 2024, making it China’s first city to post a “5-trillion” industrial tally, and its above-scale industrial value added again ranked first nationally in 2025. Exports remain a pillar: Shenzhen’s import-export total reached 4.55 trillion yuan in 2025 and the city sustained a 33-year run leading mainland Chinese cities on exports.
That outward-facing capacity is being fuelled by high R&D intensity and a dense innovation ecosystem. Shenzhen’s R&D intensity reached 6.67% of GDP, the highest among Chinese cities, with enterprise spending accounting for more than 90% of business research outlays. The city is home to a nationwide-leading number of ‘specialized, sophisticated, distinctive and innovative’ small-and-medium enterprises and has consistently increased public and private R&D spending throughout the 14th Five-Year Plan period.
Domestic demand is contributing, too. Retail sales exceeded 1 trillion yuan for the third consecutive year as online sales gained 10.5% and brick-and-mortar consumption, notably dining and goods retail, staged a steady recovery. At the same time, Shenzhen is trying to accelerate new consumption formats — digital commerce, esports, live-streaming sales and unmanned retail — through a recently published three-year action plan for the city’s consumption environment.
There are, however, warning signs. Fixed-asset investment plunged 21.7% in 2025, with real-estate development spending collapsing by 31.0% and infrastructure investment down marginally. The contraction in broad-based investment contrasts with robust, targeted capital flows into strategic fields: industrial technology renovation rose 19.2%, information and software services investment grew 67.7%, and science and technical services expanded 16.1%.
Shenzhen’s policy advantages and dense industrial clusters underpin its ability to turn innovation into commercial output quickly. The city’s famed Huafu/Huaqiangbei electronics district, compact and vertically integrated, provides a rapid path from design to prototype to mass production, shortening the product cycle to days and weeks rather than months. That kind of localized supply-chain integration is one reason Shenzhen’s exports of items such as digital cameras, 3D printers, testing instruments and medical devices account for a substantial share of national shipments in those categories.
Beyond the city limits, Shenzhen’s governance experiments and outward industrial investment are being used to rebalance Guangdong’s geography of growth. The “flying land” model of industrial spillovers — exemplified by the Shenzhen–Shan Special Cooperation Zone and the BYD super-factory there — shows how Shenzhen is physically extending its manufacturing footprint into neighbouring zones. In 2025 the deep-shan cooperation zone saw electricity consumption jump 26.1%, powered by a factory that produced 290,000 vehicles and has become a critical node in BYD’s global manufacturing network.
The provincial picture matters for national competitiveness. Guangdong’s lower-than-expected growth, and its reliance on a small number of supernodes for most incremental output, leaves the province vulnerable if those hubs slow. Jiangsu’s more balanced expansion has already narrowed the gap in absolute GDP, and if Guangdong’s broader industrial recovery lags, it could lose long-term advantage in manufacturing scale and regional influence.
Shenzhen’s hosting of the APEC leaders’ informal meeting in 2026 presents a timely opportunity to showcase its “buy global, sell global” service architecture and to attract bilateral and multilateral investment. The city intends to use the event to expand digital and green trade, strengthen outbound investment services and polish the “Invest in Shenzhen” brand — moves intended to deepen its global commercial footprint and attract higher-value services.
For international audiences, Shenzhen’s story is a reminder that China’s growth is increasingly uneven but still driven by a relatively small set of dynamic urban innovation hubs. Shenzhen is not only vying for the label of a 4-trillion-yuan city; it is testing whether an export-, R&D- and firm-led growth model can be the template that lifts a broader, industrially strained province over the next planning cycle.