Jinan, capital of East China's Shandong province is accelerating the construction of industrial clusters for big data and striving to build itself into a leading software city in China.

Wang Zhonglin, mayor of the city, made the statements at the 2019 China (Jinan) Digital Economy Summit on Sept 27.

The summit gathered many domestic experts, government officials and corporate executives to explore the development trends of China's digital economy and deepen industry exchanges and cooperation.

In recent years, Jinan has ramped up great efforts in bolstering its digital economy. In January, the city rolled out a raft of measures to promote its advanced manufacturing and digital economy.

Accordingly, the city authorities pledged to invest a total of 500 million yuan ($72.4 million) to support its advanced manufacturing and digital sectors.

Eight areas were highlighted in the released policies.

These covered the building of industry and innovation centers, promoting digital transformation and optimizing the environment for the digital economy as well as the development of advanced manufacturing.

Officials said that the city's software and digital industries have witnessed considerable progress in the past several years, with the support of national-level platforms such as the Jinan National Supercomputing Center and some leading software companies including Inspur Group.

Last year, on the macroeconomic level,  the city's digital economy was worth 290 billion yuan. That accounted for 37 percent of the city's total economy output and its software and information service sectors also ranked it first in the province.

On the microeconomic level that has translated to very impressive individual examples. A state-of-the-art E-class supercomputer, for example, with a speed of up to 10 quadrillion calculations per second has been in use since 2018. Elsewhere, Sinotruk has rolled off the world's first production line for driverless electric trucks.

Experts said that the digital and software industries are playing an increasingly important role in the shift from old to new growth drivers and are also key to promoting high-quality development of Jinan's real economy.

Furthermore, Jinan will set up special funds to attract more software companies and support technology research and development, product applications and public service platform construction.

More efforts will also be made to accelerate the upgrade of traditional industries to make them more digitalized, connected and smart, which will also unleash gigantic domestic market potential.