Inside Shenzhen: Visiting China's Silicon Valley
FemTech Association Asia visited Shenzhen to explore the next generation of medical innovation thanks to a special invite from MedTech World Asia.
Often described as the Silicon Valley of China, Shenzhen is a city built around efficiency, technology, manufacturing and innovation. The scale of the technology being developed is enormous and varied. The speed and quality with which technology is being translated into healthcare products, devices, solutions and systems is incomparable.
Shenzhen has transformed dramatically in just a few decades. In 2025, the city’s GDP reached RMB 3.87 trillion, with the economy growing 5.5% (Shenzhen Government). Within Shenzhen sits Nanshan District (translates to“South Mountain”) which has become one of China's most remarkable technology and innovation hubs. This compact district is home to the headquarters of leading tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent, and the capital, talent, technology, manufacturing and research making impact.
Women’s health has historically suffered from fragmented research, underinvestment and a disconnect between scientific innovation and the consumer. Shenzhen demonstrates what can happen when research, engineering, manufacturing and commercialisation are brought much closer together. This can be the future of femtech innovation.
One of the highlights of our daytrip was a tour of Mindray, a global medical technology company now operating across 190+ countries and regions. The company has evolved from developing individual medical products to building increasingly integrated healthcare solutions spanning patient monitoring, ultrasound, radiology, anaesthesia, laboratory diagnostics and other areas of clinical care.
We were particularly interested in how that technology intersects with women's health.
Mindray has a dedicated women's health portfolio, including its Nuewa range of ultrasound systems. These technologies support imaging and clinical assessment across women's healthcare, demonstrating the role of advanced imaging in obstetrics and gynaecology.
Mindray highlighted their latest imaging machine managing a full -stack intelligence in a full scenarios of women's health:
Smart acquisition of prenatal screening plans with full guideline support reducing the difficulties for prenatal screening.
Smart annotation and measurement identify complex structures and standardised results, enhancing quality control.
uSketch for intuitive visualisation of fetal CHD improves clinical interpretability and advances multidisciplinary diagnostics capabilities.
Another fascinating part of the Mindray visit was seeing InnoLab and its approach to a total smart laboratory. It demonstrates how automation, data and connected systems can transform laboratory workflows by improving efficiency, consistency and the ability to manage high volumes of testing.
The system we saw could accommodate up to 1,008 samples at any given time!
What happens when diagnostic capacity for women's health becomes faster, more connected and more scalable? The answer could be significant for conditions that have historically been underdiagnosed or diagnosed too late, from reproductive health to hormonal health, fertility, pregnancy and chronic conditions that disproportionately affect women.
Shenzhen provides a powerful example of what becomes possible when those connections are supported by an ecosystem designed for innovation. We need to build stronger pathways for women's health innovation to move from idea to evidence, evidence to adoption, and adoption to scale.
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