On 17 February, Shanghai World-class “City of Design” Development Promotion Conference was held at the Friendship Hall. Gong Zheng, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and Mayor of Shanghai opened a new chapter for Shanghai World-class “City of Design” Development. Zhang Wei, Vice Mayor of Shanghai delivered a speech, and Ma Chunlei, Secretary-General of Shanghai Municipal Government and Chen Mingbo, Deputy Secretary-General of Shanghai Municipal Government attended the conference.

The conference pointed out that Shanghai must actively serve the national strategy, benchmark the world's top cities, and present a good image of Shanghai. It is necessary to give full play to the empowerment of design and enhance the competitiveness and soft power of Shanghai. In addition, Shanghai must also focus on building a design ecosystem and work together to build a city of design. Xu Xiaoliang, Co-CEO of Fosun International, attended the conference and announced the establishment of the Fosun Consumer Technology Fund, hoping to leverage more social resources through industrial capital and inject more vitality into the fashion, consumption and design industries in Shanghai and even the whole country.

In recent years, with the deepening of China's economic transformation and upgrading, the national economy has been operating steadily under the "new normal", and the constantly escalating consumer demand has put forward higher requirements for the consumer market.Fashion consumption is a new driving force for the economic growth of Shanghai and even the Yangtze River Delta. Equipped with rich innovation resources, a solid fashion foundation, and the characteristic of openness, Shanghai prospectively proposed to build a "city of design, city of fashion, city of brands" to enhance the city's soft power. Fosun can make more contributions in this regard. As a global consumer group born in Shanghai and rooted in China, Fosun has gradually formed four major segments, namely health, happiness, wealth and intelligent manufacturing through the twin-driver of "industry operations + industrial investment" in the past 30 years. The industrial cluster targeting family customers covers many sub-industries such as healthcare, gold and jewelry, fashion, cultural tourism, insurance and securities, etc.

Fosun Consumer Technology Fund will focus on investing in the happiness industry of Fosun’s ecosystem. Integrating the strengths of the Fosun Capital team in the fields of digital economy and new consumption (including new retail, new categories and brands, new marketing approaches, etc.), it will establish plans according to new trends, explore local good projects and good companies, and help small and medium-sized enterprises in the fields of fashion, consumption, and design achieve sustainable growth.

At the "Shanghai City of Design Forum" held that afternoon, Fosun and "Shanghai Design Week" formally reached a strategic cooperation to become Shanghai Design Week’s co-creation partner for the next decade. In the future, both parties will carry out comprehensive cooperation in product development, brand marketing and other dimensions around the "Oriental Life Aesthetics".

Xu Xiaoliang said, "Regardless of the establishment of the industrial fund or the cooperation with ‘Shanghai Design Week’, Fosun hopes to leverage its experience and capabilities in industry operations and capital operations accumulated over the years to make a greater contribution to Shanghai World-class ‘City of Design’ Development. In the future, based on the value judgment and trend of ‘Oriental Life Aesthetics’, Fosun will provide more good products and services with the charm of ‘Oriental Life Aesthetics’ to domestic customers in Shanghai and China to meet consumers’ growing demand for quality life, and comprehensively improve the ‘soft power’ of Shanghai and the country."