Two IPOs in half a month, Hefei has become the fourth city in China.

On July 27, Changxin Technology went public with a market capitalization of 3.28 trillion yuan, topping the A-share market. On August 11, Guoyi Quantum was listed, opening 418% higher with a market cap of 44 billion yuan. In half a month, both companies came from Hefei.

On the day Changxin went public, the total market value of A-share listed companies in Hefei skyrocketed from 1.27 trillion yuan to over 4.55 trillion yuan. The city's ranking jumped directly from 19th nationwide to 4th, second only to Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai.

The "fourth city" in terms of A-share market value has only Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen ahead of it.

This is not the first time Hefei has hit the headlines of the capital market. BOE in 2008 and NIO in 2020, none of the moves were too early, and every time Hefei took action when others were hesitating.

But this time the significance is different. Changxin is extremely large in size — with a market cap of 3 trillion yuan, Hefei's state-owned assets have a floating profit on the book of over 1 trillion yuan. This figure is close to three quarters of Hefei's GDP in 2025. A provincial capital in central China has earned an economic volume equivalent to that of a whole province through a single equity investment.

In the first half of 2026, Hefei's GDP reached 707.3 billion yuan, up 6.8% year on year, ranking first in growth rate among all cities with a GDP exceeding one trillion yuan. The added value of industries above designated size increased by 25.6%, of which the electronic information industry saw a growth rate as high as 92.5%.

Ranked fourth in A-share market value, and first in GDP growth rate among trillion-GDP cities, Hefei's position is undergoing changes.

The outside world calls this "gambling". Hefei itself calls it "industrial investment".

What is the difference between gambling and industrial investment? Gambling is betting on odds, while industrial investment is doing the math. What Hefei has calculated is an account that spans decades.

Hefei does not invest in enterprises, but fills gaps in the industrial chain

In 2008, Hefei decided to introduce BOE's 6th-generation production line. The total investment of the project was 17.5 billion yuan, equivalent to more than 50% of Hefei's local fiscal revenue that year. At that time, Hefei was still planning its subway, and if the money was invested in this project, the subway construction would have to be suspended.

Why did Hefei dare to do that? Because Hefei was already a national home appliance manufacturing base at that time, with Midea, GREE and Haier all setting up factories in the city. However, the most core component of home appliances — liquid crystal panels — were all imported. The "panel shortage" meant that the bulk of the profits of the entire home appliance industry were taken away by others.

The account Hefei calculated was not "whether BOE can make money", but "if Hefei does not have the panel industry, can the home appliance industry still be retained".

This calculation turned out to be correct. The total investment of BOE's three production lines exceeded 100 billion yuan, making Hefei a global hub for the new display industry. More critically, BOE has nurtured a complete display industrial chain, with supporting enterprises such as Rainbow Optoelectronics and Sanli Photoelectric settling in Hefei one after another.

The same logic was applied to Changxin in 2016. Hefei was already a major panel industry hub, but panel driver chips and memory chips were all imported. The "chip shortage", just like the "panel shortage", was the critical bottleneck of the industrial chain.

For the 18 billion yuan investment in the first phase of Changxin, Hefei Industrial Investment contributed 14.4 billion yuan, accounting for 80% of the total. In the following ten years, Changxin accumulated a total loss of 36.65 billion yuan. Hefei did not withdraw its investment. When other investors exited at the end of 2024, Hefei even took the initiative to pay nearly 2 billion yuan to take over the old shares.

The investment in NIO in 2020 had a more straightforward calculation. Hefei was already a city known for its "chip and panel" industries at that time, but it lacked a leading enterprise in the automobile sector. NIO was short of capital, while Hefei lacked a new energy vehicle OEM, so their needs matched. With an investment of 7 billion yuan, NIO's China headquarters settled in Hefei. Five years later, Hefei's output of new energy vehicles reached 1.371 million units, ranking first nationwide.

The three investments all targeted gaps in the industrial chain. BOE filled the "panel" gap, Changxin filled the "chip" gap, and NIO filled the "vehicle" gap. Hefei was not gambling on which enterprise could succeed, but calculating "if this industry does not settle in Hefei, can Hefei's existing industries survive".

A report by an academician changed the life of a post-90s generation

The story of Guoyi Quantum is different from the previous three. It was not introduced by Hefei, but grew right in Hefei.

In 2010, He Yu, a student from the School of the Gifted Young of the University of Science and Technology of China, attended a report. The speaker was his supervisor, Du Jiangfeng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Du Jiangfeng shared an experience: his team once needed to purchase an electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer. A foreign company initially quoted 6 million yuan, but after the team scraped together enough money, the foreign company raised the price to 10 million yuan out of the blue, claiming that "our product is the best, so the price must also be the best".

He Yu was 17 that year. The next day he went to Du Jiangfeng and said he wanted to develop domestic scientific instruments. Later he joined Du Jiangfeng's laboratory and started to build quantum precision measurement equipment.

In 2016, 24-year-old He Yu founded Guoyi Quantum together with Du Jiangfeng and Rong Xing. In the early stage of starting the business, Du Jiangfeng lent him a 14-square-meter office. It was normal for them to meet clients during the day and write codes at night.

In 2018, Guoyi Quantum launched the first domestically produced commercial X-band electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer, which was exactly the type of equipment that Du Jiangfeng was once blocked from purchasing abroad.

In April 2025, just one step away from IPO, Du Jiangfeng, as required by the relevant organization department, publicly listed and transferred all his shares through the property rights exchange. After the academician withdrew, He Yu and Rong Xing became the actual controllers of the company.

On August 11, 2026, 34-year-old He Yu rang the bell at the STAR Market. The teenager who once fidgeted in the lecture hall fulfilled his promise of "making instruments for the country" in ten years.

Guoyi Quantum has not made a profit so far, with a net loss attributable to shareholders of 5.7972 million yuan in 2025. But the market has given it a market value of 44 billion yuan — the market is betting on the certainty of "domestic substitution of high-end scientific instruments".

Behind the trillion-yuan floating profit is the determination to "never switch tracks"

The outside world calls Hefei the top "VC city". But what Hefei does is not venture investment at all.

The cycle of venture capital is 3 to 5 years, pursuing high returns. Hefei's investment cycle starts from 10 years, aiming to build industrial chains from scratch.

Hefei's state-owned assets hold about 33.1% of the equity of Changxin, corresponding to a market value of more than 1 trillion yuan. This figure is very impressive, but three prerequisites need to be clarified.

First, this sum is still a book floating profit for now. Changxin is in a 36-month lock-up period, and the actual reduction of holdings will be implemented step by step. The 1 trillion yuan is just "paper wealth", not cash.

Second, Hefei was able to come up with this sum of money because it had completed several rounds of exit cycles before. For the BOE project, Hefei's state-owned assets completed the exit through secondary market share reduction, with a profit of more than 30 billion yuan. For the NIO project, the initial 7 billion yuan investment was recovered within one year, with a net profit of 3.5 billion yuan. The money from these exits was reinvested into Changxin, forming a cycle of "investment - exit - reinvestment".

Third, and the most easily overlooked point — Hefei has not never failed. It lost money on projects such as Rongan Power, Hefei Saiwei and Xinhao Plasma. The difference is that Hefei did not change its direction just because of one failure, nor did it get carried away just because of one success.

Li Xuenan, a professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, calls Hefei's investment trajectory a "learning curve" — BOE made Hefei familiar with the cycle of heavy asset manufacturing; NIO let Hefei experience capital replenishment for enterprises in their trough; Changxin brought Hefei into the deep water area of the semiconductor industry. Every step accumulates the capability to handle complex industrial projects.

Hefei's industrial planning does not swing with government leadership transitions. This sentence sounds easy, but it is extremely difficult to implement. The tenure of local government officials in China is usually five years, while it took ten years for Changxin to go from initial investment to listing, and the quantum industry took decades from layout to harvest. This means that every successive leader has to continue the unfinished work of their predecessors, with no obvious political achievements visible in the short term.

Half a month, two IPOs, one with a 3 trillion yuan market cap and the other 44 billion yuan, have pushed Hefei into the spotlight.

But what is really worth exploring is not what Hefei has successfully invested in, but why Hefei can keep making successful investments.

The answer does not lie in the wisdom of a single decision, but in the operation of a complete system: the University of Science and Technology of China provides the technology source, state-owned assets provide long-term capital, industrial chain thinking provides investment direction, and the unswerving political determination provides sufficient time.

This system was not built in a day, nor did it emerge suddenly at a certain moment. It was accumulated through countless decisions starting from the introduction of the University of Science and Technology of China, followed by BOE, Changxin, Guoyi Quantum and NIO.

This system is not risk-free. If Changxin's market value corrects, the trillion-yuan floating profit will vanish in a flash. The competition in the new energy vehicle industry is far from over, and it remains unknown whether NIO can achieve sustained profitability. The quantum industry is still far from large-scale commercialization.

But Hefei has proven with decades of practice that when a local government is willing to do the math with a long enough time horizon, the figures on its books will be completely different from those calculated by others.