2025 China Dental Valley Industry Development Conference
On April 24th, the 2025 China Dental Valley Industry Development Conference grandly kicked off at the Western China International Expo City. China Dental Valley, holding three "global firsts", attracted 3 academicians to "collectively brainstorm" over a single tooth. The wisdom of West China and the manufacturing capabilities of Ziyang collided deeply, with 12 newly settled enterprises signing contracts collectively, demonstrating to the world the firm steps and strong momentum of Ziyang, Sichuan, in leveraging a "small tooth" to drive a "hundred-billion-level" market.
The conference site.
China Dental Valley is accelerating its extension from a single manufacturing industry to a diversified industry. At the conference, Ziyang High-tech Zone signed contracts with 12 newly settled enterprises, covering frontier and emerging fields such as invisible orthodontic appliances, dental X-ray machines, and oral material research and development. These new projects not only add new forces to the invisible orthodontic appliance field in China Dental Valley, increase upstream key material research and development projects, strengthen the collaboration between upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and further improve the complete "material-equipment-terminal" chain, but also expand the industrial boundary of "oral +", promote the extension of Dental Valley to related industries, and explore emerging tracks such as big health and medical aesthetics.
12 projects signed on site.
At the conference, the signing of a cooperation agreement between the Ziyang Municipal People's Government and West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, and the official licensing of the China Oral Medicine Collaborative Innovation Platform became the focus. This platform directly addresses the "bottleneck" issues such as insufficient efficiency in the transformation of innovative achievements in the oral industry and a shortage of high-end talents - through the in-depth integration of the innovation chain, industrial chain, talent chain, and capital chain, it promotes technological research on domestic high-end oral devices and biological materials.
"We want to truly achieve a seamless connection 'from the laboratory to the production line' for the oral devices made by 'Sichuan Intelligence'!" said Wang Jianhua, President of the China Industry-University-Research Cooperation Promotion Association.
Participants.
"When cutting-edge biotechnologies such as tissue engineering and targeted drugs move from the laboratory to clinical application in stomatology, what are the most difficult transformation bottlenecks we face?" At the end of the conference, academicians, experts, and representatives of leading oral enterprises conducted a brainstorming session around the theme of "Integrated Innovation, Ecological Empowerment: Jointly Shaping the Future of China Dental Valley and the Oral Industry".
Regarding innovation transformation, academicians and experts proposed improving the policy mechanism for achievement transformation. For universities and research institutions, they suggested incorporating the effectiveness of achievement transformation into the evaluation system and recommended that Dental Valley build platforms for technology transfer, etc. In addition, all parties also offered suggestions on issues such as the update of clinical standards, regional coordinated development, the creation of core competitiveness of Dental Valley, and the construction of soft power, helping China Dental Valley move towards a world-class oral industry highland.
Looking back at the development history of China's oral medical device industry, 8 years ago was a key turning point. At that time, China's oral medical device industry faced severe challenges, with 80% of products such as dental medical equipment, oral materials, and oral devices relying on imports, and high-end products almost entirely monopolized by international brands. On one hand, the national oral industry was developing vigorously with an annual growth rate of 20%, with a market scale exceeding 100 billion yuan, showing huge potential; on the other hand, there was the awkward situation of key technologies being controlled by others and a serious shortage of high-end supplies, and the contradiction between supply and demand urgently needed to be resolved.
China Dental Valley.
In 2016, the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government planted the dream of "a single tooth" in Ziyang. After 8 years of accumulation, in 2024, the output value of China Dental Valley reached nearly 4 billion yuan, with 335 "Ziyang-made" products sold to more than 60 countries and regions around the world. It also achieved the world's first in terms of planned construction scale of 6 square kilometers, the world's first in the integrity of the oral industry chain, and the world's first in the annual output of 72 million invisible orthodontic appliances. The brand value of China Dental Valley is estimated to exceed 100 billion yuan, firmly ranking first among the national oral equipment and materials industry clusters.
From the dream of "a single tooth" to the extension of "a chain", and then to the establishment of a complete industry chain ecosystem of "production, education, research, sales, medical care, and health preservation". Today, relying on the Ziyang Branch of the Sichuan Innovation Service Station of the National Medical Products Administration Device Evaluation Center, etc., China Dental Valley has realized "class I certificates handled on the same day, class II certificates without queuing, and class III certificates handled smoothly". The product registration time is 60% shorter than usual, and the approval efficiency leads the country. It has also established an oral industry service team to provide "one-on-one" full-cycle services, reducing the average time from signing to production of projects by 3-6 months, making the "Dental Valley speed" a powerful engine for enterprise development.
Standing at a new starting point, China Dental Valley has formulated a new plan: in addition to consolidating advantageous industries such as invisible orthodontic appliances and oral scanning equipment, it will focus on the "oral +" track and extend to fields such as medicine, ophthalmology, and orthopedics. It will also focus on promoting enterprises with new implant materials that have obtained certificates to enter centralized procurement and expand the market, promote the recruitment of oral consumer goods and oral material enterprises, and project transformation to further improve the industrial chain.
At present, China Dental Valley has been included in Sichuan's 4 characteristic and advantageous industry pilots. Its development path is not only a vivid practice of "Healthy China" but also provides a "characteristic industrial chain" sample for industrial upgrading in central and western China.
