Nine cities in the Yangtze River Delta region established an intelligent equipment industries alliance on Aug 30 to boost industrial innovation and integration in the region.

The cities include Shanghai, Hangzhou, Jiaxing, Jinhua, Huzhou, Suzhou, Xuancheng, Wuhu and Hefei. 

The alliance will focus on establishing a cooperation mechanism to coordinate industries, universities and research institutes and promote the development of key technologies and intelligent equipment industries. 

As the initiator of the alliance, Huzhou in Zhejiang province has been stepping up efforts in recent years to promote industrial transformation and innovation, and has been working to develop the city's logistics, new energy vehicles, intelligent elevators, geographic information, environmentally-friendly equipment and numerically-controlled machine tools. 

Huzhou currently houses five national-level enterprise technology centers, four national model companies for technological innovation, and 98 R&D platforms at the provincial level or above.

In the first half of the year, the value-added of the city's high-end equipment manufacturing grew 13.4 percent year-on-year, more than any other city in Zhejiang.