Shenzhen in spotlight as China looks to Internet for growth

When Microsoft planned to resurrect a conference this year with hardware makers after a seven-year hiatus, it settled on the southern Chinese city Shenzhen as the ideal meeting place.

The decision to move the two-day conference from the United States to Shenzhen came as a growing number of Chinese-made PC, tablets and smartphone makers have gained greater sway in the global IT industry over the past seven years. Many of them operate from Shenzhen, a booming town that borders Hong Kong.

"Shenzhen is absolutely the best place for us to host the conference," Terry Myerson, executive vice president for operating systems at Microsoft, told Xinhua in an interview on Wednesday.

"This is about engineers working with engineers, so we brought our engineers here to work directly with companies headquartered in Shenzhen to build great products."

"So much hardware innovation is taking place here."

Several announcements on the latest version of Windows were made by Microsoft's Chinese partners at the conference, held from Wednesday to Thursday.

Lenovo will launch smartphones running Windows 10 sometime this summer while Xiaomi will test the operating system among a group of users on its flagship smartphone Mi4 later this year.

Microsoft will also allow Chinese users to update to the latest version of Windows on their computers through services offered by Chinese internet firms like Tencent and Qihoo 360.

The rise of Microsoft's Shenzhen-based partners like Tencent, Huawei, ZTE have also helped raise the global profile of their breeding ground, which an article from U.S. magazine Inc. refers to as the "ground zero for technological serendipity."

"Shenzhen aspires to be the Silicon Valley for hardware makers, a place where accelerators are eager to help you build, test, refine and make a million of something all in the same day," according to the magazine article.

The city breeds the largest number of tech firms listed on the Growth Enterprise Board at the Shenzhen Stock Exchange than any other Chinese cities, and boasts more than 600 public libraries.

Shenzhen also leads among 20 provincial capitals and regional economic powerhouses on the Chinese mainland, excluding Beijing and Shanghai, in areas such as technological sophistication and business environment, according to a study co-authored by China Development Research Foundation and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, released on Wednesday.