Equipment manufacturers above a designated size (those with annual operating revenue of roughly $3.1 million or more) in East China's Zhejiang province achieved a total industrial output of 3.18 trillion yuan ($491.3 billion) in 2020, up 10.8 percent year-on-year, latest data from the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology showed.

This was the first time the annual output hit 3 trillion yuan. Equipment manufacturers above a designated size contributed to 84.48 percent of the overall growth in industrial output made by the province's manufacturers above a designated size.

Equipment manufacturers' share of industrial output for the province's above-designated-size manufacturers rose from 36.8 percent in 2015 to 44.2 percent in 2020.

Within the equipment manufacturing sector, particularly robust development was witnessed in intelligent manufacturing segments, such as robots, high-profile numerically-controlled machine tools, smart textile machineries, and smart logistics equipment, which surged 25.2 percent in industrial value-add last year.

R&D expenses by the province's equipment manufacturers above a designated size in 2020 grew by 18.4 percent to 118.6 billion yuan, taking up 4.4 percent of their operating revenue. Fifty-two percent of their operating revenue came from the sales of new products last year.

Many Zhejiang equipment manufacturers capitalized on the opportunities created by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Boreasa Technologies, a Hangzhou-based manufacturer of medical equipment, delivered 150,000 turbofans for medical-use respirators, which generated 170 million yuan in sales, 80 times more than in 2019.