While upgrading traditional marine industries, Weihai, an east China coastal city, is moving to leverage 89 key projects to catalyze marine economy of higher quality this year, reported local portal whnews.cn citing Weihai marine development authorities recently.
In total, the city foresaw 28.6 billion yuan investment in these projects and earmarked 6.42 billion yuan for 2026 to spur new growth drivers in marine fishing, marine products processing and seaside tourism sectors.
When local salmon farming firms hailed for the first time natural reproduction of salmons lately, Weihai took a critical step in expanding local marine breeding industry and nurturing a complete salmon-centered industrial chain.
Currently, a batch of salmon breeding, farming and deep processing projects are underway. For instance, a local eco-agricultural park operator started building a land-based factory-style recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) project for salmon fry breeding recently.
Another local salmon breeding company planned similar factory-style RAS-based workshops covering 4,300 square meters and in Renhe Town, a food technology firm intended to construct workshops and refrigerated warehouses to process tunas and salmons.
Meanwhile, local kelp and monkfish processing businesses are seeking footings on the higher end of marine products-processing value chains. In Rongcheng, the kelp extraction project of a local marine biotechnology company is expected to produce one million boxes of kelp extract cosmetics and functional food products annually.
A Weihai-situated marine food firm is working on an automatic processing program to upgrade production lines and upon completion, automated processing of frozen monkfish fillets is likely to raise annual output to 100 tonnes.
Apart from these, a comprehensive marine testing public service platform is under construction in Weihai now, leveraging its monitoring, on-site operation testing and test guarantee systems and seven waterborne testing platforms to verify key marine disaster prevention technologies and facilitate high-quality marine industry development.
In Weihai, marine economy is also factoring in boosters from seaside and nautical tourism. For example, the city's blue trunk line high-end tourism program blueprinted three cruise-based exquisite tourism routes and in last July, a route touring multiple scenic sites of Weihai became operational.
This year, a 2-hour-long new route linking Weihai Port and Longyan Port will open and another night route touring Weihai Bay is being planned to further foster local marine economy.
(Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
A single purchase
