Inside Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China
Inside Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China.
In 1980, Shenzhen was a fishing town of about 30,000 people across the border from Hong Kong. That year it became one of China’s first Special Economic Zones. Today it has more than 18 million people, and Tencent, Huawei, BYD and DJI all have their headquarters there.
In Shenzhen, the “future” is already part of everyday life. Every public bus runs on electricity, and the taxis followed soon after. Shenzhen makes about 70% of China’s consumer drones and half of its industrial ones. Meituan’s drones deliver takeaway from merchants including McDonald’s. Cargo drones flew hundreds of thousands of delivery flights across the city last year, and Pony.ai’s latest robotaxis now break even per vehicle.
Last week, as part of Hong Kong FinTech Week x StartmeupHK 2026, I spent two days on the GBA Immersive Executive Tour in Shenzhen. I went expecting clever technology and came back thinking about something less glamorous: what it takes to deploy that technology at scale. Four company visits made the point better than any panel could.
Sunwoda: from your phone to the power grid
There is a fair chance the battery in your phone passed through Sunwoda. Two brothers founded the company in Shenzhen in 1997 to assemble phone battery packs. By 2024 it held about a third of the global mobile phone battery market. It now makes batteries for electric vehicles and the grid as well.
At Sunwoda Mobility Energy Technology, the discussion moved quickly from single cells to the systems
built from them. A representative walked us through how cells are assembled into cabinets for utility-scale energy storage, and how cabinets are combined into larger projects. We also heard how the company tracks batteries through their working life and recovers materials through its recycling operations.
What stayed with me was the breadth of it. The questions in the room were about supply chains, where products end up and what happens to a battery when it is finished. For a company telling a growth story, those answers matter as much as the cell on display.
PUDU: robots that call for backup
You may have met a PUDU robot without knowing it. Its BellaBot is the restaurant delivery robot with a cat’s face on its screen. Stroke it once or twice and it looks curious; keep going and it gets annoyed.
The robots we saw in Shenzhen were more serious. They handle delivery, cleaning, warehouse movement and inspection. My favourite demonstration was a robot recognising a job it could not do and calling a better-suited robot to take over. In the warehouse, robots brought goods to staff instead of staff walking the floor to collect them.
The representative said one warehouse customer had improved efficiency by 15% compared with its old process. That is the company’s own figure, but it points to the right question for any investor or customer: what changes when the technology goes to work?
Tencent: paying with the palm of your hand
Tencent started in Shenzhen in 1998. Weixin and its international version, WeChat, now have more than 1.4 billion combined monthly active users. Tencent Financial Technology runs the payments, credit, wealth management and insurance inside them.
We started with Weixin Pay, known as WeChat Pay outside mainland China. The pitch was reach, not just scale. A family shop or a market stall can take digital payments at low cost. Patients register and pay hospital fees on their phones instead of queuing. Electricity, water and gas bills take a few taps. Payment fades into the background.
Then came the part everyone was waiting for: palm payment. You hold your hand over a scanner and the payment is done, with no phone and no card. Setting it up takes under a minute: you scan your palm once, scan a QR code to link it to your WeChat account, and from then on you just hover your palm to pay. The scanner reads both the lines on your palm and the veins beneath the skin. It launched in May 2023 on Beijing’s Daxing Airport Express. Seeing it in person, it is easy to imagine it becoming normal, although for now it sits alongside QR codes rather than replacing them.
The bigger story for investors was international. Tencent is building links so that visitors and overseas senders can use the Weixin network. It signed a memorandum of understanding with Visa in late October. In the same week we were there, it signed memoranda of understanding with Mastercard and UnionPay International. Ahead of APEC in Shenzhen, US PayPal users can now scan Weixin Pay QR codes too.
The visit closed on AI agents. Unlike a chatbot that only answers questions, an agent takes action. In one afternoon we went from a scan, to a wave of the hand, to software that acts on your behalf. Each step solved a real problem. That is the test every growth story has to pass.
Intellifusion: the DeepSeek hometown deal
The last stop was Intellifusion, a Shenzhen AI chip company listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market (688343) since April 2023. It began in computer vision, with facial recognition systems for Shenzhen’s Longgang district. Its focus now is inference: the chips and systems that run AI models once they have been trained. It has a lighter side too: it has even developed an AI plush toy under its Dr.LookAI brand.
We were shown an integrated system with eight inference accelerator cards and room for sixteen. The company says that when it is fully loaded it can run full versions of large models such as DeepSeek. The guide was frank that restricted access to foreign technology had pushed it towards domestically developed chips.
The best story was Zhanjiang, a coastal city in western Guangdong. In March, Intellifusion won a RMB420 million tender to build an AI inference cluster of about a thousand cards. The city wants to become an “AI-permeated city”. Fittingly, it is also the hometown of DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng.
The guide sold on price. He said the product costs one-third to two-thirds as much as a comparable Huawei system, and that it was benchmarked against NVIDIA’s H100. Those are the company’s comparisons, not ours.
The financials are the other half of the story. Intellifusion reported 2025 revenue of RMB1.34 billion and a net loss of RMB422 million. That goes to a question raised more than once during the week: how far is AI from true profitability? The company has also applied to list in Hong Kong, first in July 2025 and again in April 2026. The deployments are real. What investors will want to know is when the economics catch up.
What I took home
In under half a century, Shenzhen went from fishing nets to robotaxis. What I saw last week was less a glimpse of the future than a working version of the present, at a scale few cities have reached. The companies building it are not waiting for the world to catch up. The question for investors is which of them will turn deployment into earnings.
If your investor story is stronger on the technology than on when the economics catch up, we should talk. That is exactly the work Investability does with listed and pre-IPO growth companies across Australia and Hong Kong.
Get in touch with the team.
Author: Dannika Warburton
Dannika is Founder and Principal of Investability, an investor relations and media relations consultancy based in Australia and Hong Kong, with over 15 years capital markets experience across investment banking, institutional sales and IR.
