On May 13, the Huai'an Municipal People's Government held a press conference to release details of the "2025 Huai'an Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of Specialized, Sophisticated, Distinctive, and Innovative Enterprises." To encourage enterprises to deepen their engagement in niche sectors, accelerate both qualitative improvement and rapid quantitative growth of specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises, and promote the city's new-type industrialization and high-quality leapfrog development, Huai'an has introduced the "2025 Huai'an Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of Specialized, Sophisticated, Distinctive, and Innovative Enterprises" (hereinafter referred to as the "Action Plan").

The Action Plan is composed of three parts: main objectives, key tasks, and supporting measures. The main objective is that by the end of 2025, Huai'an aims to cumulatively cultivate 2 "Single Champion" manufacturing enterprises, 40 specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative "Little Giant" enterprises, 400 specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and 1,500 innovative SMEs. To achieve these goals, the Action Plan identifies six key task areas: strengthening the tiered cultivation mechanism, supporting the development of specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative projects, promoting the construction of enterprise innovation platforms, encouraging digital transformation and green development, facilitating financial support channels, and enhancing policy support, while also specifying the corresponding supporting measures.

The Action Plan's distinctive highlights are mainly reflected in three aspects: The first is to strengthen tiered cultivation. For a city, creating an organic ecosystem composed of enterprises at different levels and scales is key to promoting economic development. Specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises, with their long-term focus on niche sectors, strong innovation capabilities, high quality and efficiency, and great growth potential, serve as the backbone for high-quality development of the manufacturing industry and act as the "foundation" and "stabilizer" of this ecosystem. Based on this consideration, the Action Plan clearly proposes to improve and refine a tiered enterprise cultivation system: from innovative SMEs to specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative SMEs, then to specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative "Little Giant" enterprises, and finally to national "Single Champion" manufacturing enterprises, promoting enterprise growth throughout the entire lifecycle. The second is to strengthen policy support. To better guide SMEs on the path of specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative development, Huai'an has further increased policy support. This includes establishing a dedicated fund for specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises within the dedicated fund to guide and support the city's industrial development, further providing interest subsidies for equipment investment loans of specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises on the basis of continuing to reward those that have been recognized, and increasing subsidies for their R&D expenses, together forming a comprehensive package of support measures. To encourage counties and districts (industrial parks) to cultivate specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises, additional rewards are provided to counties and districts (industrial parks) that are first recognized as national or provincial-level SME specialized industrial clusters or that exceed expectations in completing specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprise investment projects. The third is to strengthen factor and service guarantees. The city continues to optimize approval procedures for projects involving specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises, including project approval and filing, engineering planning, environmental assessment, safety assessment, energy assessment, and construction drawing review, simplifying processes and further improving approval efficiency. Administrative inspections related to enterprise safety production, ecological and environmental protection, and fire control are standardized, and an inclusive and prudent regulatory approach is promoted to create a supportive social environment for the development of specialized, sophisticated, distinctive, and innovative enterprises.