Thousands of years ago, Shu brocade, lacquerware, tea and other products produced in Chengdu, Sichuan province, sold well along the ancient Silk Road in Central Asia, West Asia and Europe.

Building itself into a modern socialist international metropolis with global influence and reputation in western China, Chengdu is boosting advanced manufacturing, a new calling card of the city.

Nowadays, people deal with various screens every day on their mobile phones, tablets and laptops. If you use a mobile phone with a folding screen, its display likely comes from Chinese display panel supplier BOE Technology Group.

The company has built China's first flexible organic light-emitting diodes, or OLED, industrial clusters, covering three flexible active-matrix organic light-emitting diodes, or AMOLED, production lines in Chengdu and Mianyang in Sichuan province and Chongqing.

China's sixth-generation flexible AMOLED production line was first mass-produced in Chengdu in 2017 and has been used by many well-known brands around the world.

The BOE Chengdu vehicle display base project was put into production in October 2022.

The project mainly researches, develops, designs, produces and sells vehicle-mounted display devices. Its main products are the 5 to 48-inch LCD vehicle-mounted display modules. It produces about 15 million vehicle-mounted displays per year.

An executive said that the project is the largest centralized production base of BOE for vehicle display products.

As a leading company in the global display industry, BOE has invested in a number of projects in Chengdu, including a fourth-generation TFTLCD, sixth-generation flexible AMOLED, and a vehicle-mounted display base, with a cumulative investment of nearly 100 billion yuan ($14.52 billion).

Chengdu is also one of the two flexible AMOLED technology research and development centers that BOE has deployed nationwide.

In the field of non-screen display, "Made in Chengdu" has also won the favor of many consumers.

A report released by research organization IDC said the total shipment volume of China's projector market in the first half of 2022 was 2.34 million units.

Among them, XGIMI Technology from Chengdu has a market share of 21.1 percent, ranking it first in China.

XGIMI Technology was founded by Zhong Bo, who graduated from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, majoring in computer science.

In 2013, Zhong, who returned to Chengdu, registered and established XGIMI Technology in the Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone and took the lead in creating a new category of smart home projection in the following year.

Zhong said: "Our vision is to become a global innovative brand that is respected by consumers.

"Life in Chengdu is stable and the government has generous support policies for enterprises and talents, and developers have more room to make breakthrough products."

He added that it is not accidental to choose Chengdu at the early stage of a company, and the business environment in the city is conducive. The area also has an optical research base, especially in the field of optoelectronic display, he said.

Since 2018, XGIMI Technology has broken the long-term monopoly of foreign brands in the Chinese projector market, and has ranked first for four consecutive years.

Its products are exported to more than 100 countries and regions including the United States, Canada and Japan. Zhong said the shipments of XGIMI's Aladdin series products have ranked first place in the Japanese smart home projection market.

Going global is far more than flexible screens and smart projectors. In fact, through the Modern Silk Road — featuring China-Europe trains and international freight routes — notebook computer chips, iPads, color TVs and new energy heavy trucks produced in Chengdu are being sold all over the world in large numbers.

TCL Technology Group began to eye the Chengdu market in 2010.

Wang Cheng, chief operating officer of TCL Technology, said that the company will continue to increase investment in Chengdu's manufacturing sector and transfer more value-added links in the color TV assembly industrial chain to Chengdu.

Wind power products produced by Tianma (Chengdu) Precision Machinery, a leader in the field of wind power bearings, can meet the needs of domestic wind power machine enterprises.

The company cooperates with global machinery companies including Denmark's Vestas, Germany's Siemens Gamesa and GM in the US. Its products are exported to Europe, the US, India and Brazil.

The company exported nearly 10,000 sets of wind power bearings in 2022, accounting for about 30 percent of new installed capacity in the global market.

With the implementation of the innovation-driven manufacturing industry, Chengdu has caught global attention with its advanced heavy equipment, including the cabin core control system, information system, and onboard entertainment system in China's domestic C919 aircraft, key materials and precision components in the Shenzhou manned spacecraft and the world's first high-temperature superconducting high-speed maglev engineering prototype vehicle. Chengdu is cultivating a group of manufacturing companies that represent the image of the city.

The city is to implement the action plan for the innovation-driven development of its manufacturing industry. It will strengthen the cultivation of new research and development institutions, as well as the construction of pilot test bases and innovation platforms.

The aim is to accelerate the transformation of Chengdu's manufacturing industry and build the brand of "Intelligent manufacturing in Chengdu".