Ideas to businesses

What enables so many of Guangdong's private technology companies to move from an idea to a commercial product so quickly?

Part of the answer lies not only in the province's manufacturing strength, but also in a growing ecosystem that lowers the barriers to innovation itself.

For many hardware entrepreneurs in Shenzhen, innovation now begins with a simple click.

An engineer uploads a circuit design to an online platform, and within hours the first printed circuit board enters production. A few days later, a physical prototype is ready for testing and refinement.

"Whether it's a student experimenting with a personal idea or an early-stage startup producing a small batch of prototypes, our platform makes it possible to bring those ideas to life — something traditional manufacturing often cannot support," said an executive of operations at Shenzhen JLC Technology Group Co, an integrated platform covering PCB prototyping, component sourcing, assembly and precision manufacturing.

By digitalizing the entire process, it has reduced the cost of a single PCB prototype from several thousand yuan to just tens of yuan, while shortening delivery time from several weeks to as little as 12 hours.

"Our goal is to become an accelerator for global hardware innovation and technology commercialization," he said, adding that a humanoid robot can now move from design drawings to a fully assembled prototype in as little as one to two weeks.

By the end of 2025, JLC's online platform had attracted more than 9.59 million registered users, up 34.73 percent year-on-year. The company had also served customers in over 180 countries and regions and processed more than 21.08 million orders during the year.

"Foreign users increasingly value our end-to-end service model, spanning everything from electronic design automation to prototype manufacturing," he said. "What underpins that capability is China's complete industrial ecosystem. The ability to seamlessly connect design, components sourcing and manufacturing at such speed and scale is something that is still hard to find elsewhere in the world."