An aerial photo of Yiwu, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/zgyyw.com]

Yiwu, East China's Zhejiang province, took third place on the "China's Top 100 Counties for Investment Potential in 2021" list.

The list, created by the China Committee of 100 of Digital Economy and Urtrust ThinkTank, took into account counties' achievements in investment promotion, as well as key factors affecting future investment such as industrial foundation, high-end elements, and carrying capacity.

In recent years, Yiwu has been promoting the development of equipment manufacturing and strategic emerging industries and striving to optimize the business environment.

Over the past five years, Yiwu has introduced a total of 270 major projects, each with over 100 million yuan ($15 million) in investment, and 26 new provincial major industrial projects. It has also created two 100 billion yuan-level modern manufacturing clusters for information optoelectronics and automobile manufacturing.

In 2021, Yiwu's total industrial output value above designated size increased by 66.7 percent yearly to 116.37 billion yuan. The output value of sales totaled 116.95 billion yuan, an increase of 70.3 percent year-on-year.

This was the first time that Yiwu saw its economic data exceed 100 billion yuan, thanks to its strong efforts over the past years, according to officials.

In the first three months of this year, Yiwu's gross domestic product totaled 42.02 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8 percent. Its growth rate was 2.9 and 1.7 percentage points higher than the averages in Zhejiang province and Jinhua, respectively, ranking first among all counties and urban areas of Jinhua.