Guangzhou Nansha Launches Global Trade Cluster and Two Centers; 2025 Trade at RMB 295.9 Billion
Guangzhou Nansha launched a global cross-border trade industrial cluster on July 30, inaugurating the Guangdong Ciyuan Trading and Service Center and the Greater Bay Area Auto Export Preparation Center. Nansha's 2025 foreign trade reached RMB 295.9 billion, up 13.2% year on year, ranking first in the city. The 83,000-square-meter cluster, operated by state-owned Nansha Kaijian Group, integrates customs, tax, settlement, financing, warehousing, licensing, trade, and logistics services. The port's annual throughput exceeded 22 million TEUs. Meanwhile, regional logistics vacancy hit a record 15.2% and rents fell 12.4% amid tariff uncertainty and supply growth.
On July 30, construction of the global cross-border trade industrial cluster began in Nansha District, Guangzhou, with the Nansha Global Cross-Border Trade Industrial Cluster Ecological Service Platform and the Guangdong Ciyuan Trading and Service Center both inaugurated on the same day. Nansha sits at the geographic center of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, hosts Guangzhou's only natural deep-water port, and contributes roughly a quarter of the city's foreign trade value. In 2025, Nansha's foreign trade import and export value reached RMB 295.9 billion, up 13.2% year on year and the largest in the city. Cross-border e-commerce at the Nansha Comprehensive Bonded Zone has ranked first nationally for six consecutive years. More than 180 foreign trade routes link Nansha Port to the world; the port's annual throughput exceeded 22 million TEUs, making it one of the Chinese ports with the most routes to countries and regions along the Belt and Road.
Against a backdrop of global supply chain restructuring, the Greater Bay Area logistics and warehousing market has undergone adjustment. In 2025, cross-border e-commerce tenants turned cautious about expansion amid tariff policy uncertainty and escalating geopolitical conflicts, while market supply reached a record high. The region's average vacancy rate entered double digits for the first time, and rents came under downward pressure. As of the end of 2025, the average vacancy rate had risen 6.6 percentage points year on year to a record 15.2%, while the Greater Bay Area logistics rent index ended its recent upward trend, falling 12.4% year on year.
The newly launched global cross-border trade industrial cluster is operated by Nansha Kaijian Group, a district-owned state enterprise. Encompassing 83,000 square meters, it integrates eight service systems: customs declaration, taxation, foreign exchange settlement, financing, warehousing, licenses, trade, and logistics. Foreign trade enterprises can complete at the cluster in one stop procedures that previously required separate visits to customs, tax authorities, banks, and warehouses.
On the same day, the Greater Bay Area Auto Export Preparation Center was officially put into operation. Jointly built by Guangzhou Public Transport Group and Guangzhou Port Group, the center is located within the Nansha Jinyang Terminal port premises. It provides vehicle inspection, maintenance and repair, paint refinishing, new energy vehicle three-electric maintenance, and used car export processing, combining technical services with port operations and capable of handling large-volume new and used vehicle export orders from automakers. The center is one of the few auto export preparation complexes located within a terminal in South China, allowing vehicles to be prepared for export immediately upon arrival at port and shipped directly, eliminating off-site transfers, multiple loading and unloading operations, and off-site warehousing.
On data infrastructure, Zhongke Huizhi (Guangdong) Information Technology Co. , Ltd. has built a tamper-proof, traceable digital trade foundation based on the independently developed RepChain blockchain technology from the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The company has developed a blockchain-based international trade integrated service platform with direct data connections to customs, tax authorities, and state-owned banks. The platform has served more than 30 banks and financial institutions and over 5,000 import and export enterprises, with cumulative online settlement exceeding RMB 170 billion, collaboration efficiency among trade parties up 60%, and settlement cycles shortened by 70%. Zhongke Huizhi is the only company in China selected for both the central bank's regulatory sandbox and the Cyberspace Administration of China's blockchain plus trade finance dual pilot program.
On July 30, Zhongke Huizhi signed agreements with three payment institutions - Lakala, Nium, and Media Bank - to open cross-border payment channels and compress settlement cycles and exchange costs. The Nansha District Commerce Bureau also reached a cooperation agreement with Sinosure Guangdong Branch to cover enterprises' foreign exchange collection risks, receivables protection, and financing credit enhancement through export credit insurance. A Google cross-border e-commerce acceleration center is planned to land in Guangzhou in 2026, providing a one-stop brand incubation platform for companies going global.
Nansha's digital infrastructure has also been upgraded, with South China's only IPv6 root server and a computing resource pool exceeding 10,000 P (petaflops). In May 2026, the Guangdong Free Trade Zone issued data exit negative lists covering smart equipment manufacturing and personal credit information. Nansha formulated a supporting implementation guide and completed its first business case in early July. Nansha has also been approved for pilots in data processing and game service channels.
The Guangdong Ciyuan Trading and Service Center, established by the Guangzhou Data Exchange, targets pain points for small and medium-sized enterprises, including high AI procurement costs, difficulty in matching supply and demand, compliance risks, and slow subsidy disbursement. As a third-party service hub, the center will build a trusted aggregated service zone and establish a compliance review system. Using ciyuan as a unified measurement unit, it will implement standardized metering and accounting for AI services such as model calls and dataset usage, providing cross-platform, mutually recognizable pricing benchmarks and reconciliation basis for enterprises. The center will provide AI technical support for cross-border trade enterprises and computing power support for data processing, leveraging the agglomeration advantages of Guangdong's shipping, trade, automotive, finance, short drama, and gaming industries to build typical ciyuan going-global application scenarios. It has already initiated cooperation with Shenzhen Yitong Technology, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Intelligent Computing (Tiandun Data), Beijing Chuangshi Huacai Technology, Guangdong Yuhao Technology, and Shantou Sanshu Technology, covering corpus development, computing power support, vertical model development, and AI application scenarios.