On November 2, the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology forwarded a notice from the Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology — "Notice on Launching the Selection of the Third Batch of Manufacturing Empowerment Resources" (Yue Gong Xin Digital Industry Letter [2026] No. 67). The application deadline is November 19, and applications are submitted online through the "Yue Zhi Fu" platform.
Most business owners will not click open this document, because its reporting target is service providers, not enterprises. But I want to say that this is precisely one of the documents that enterprises should pay the most attention to.
What exactly are "empowering resources"?
To put it bluntly, Guangdong Province is building an officially certified resource pool for digital service providers. Only those on the list count as service forces endorsed by the provincial government that 'can help manufacturing enterprises carry out transformation'.
The document lays down several hard-and-fast rules, which are worth examining one by one:
First, you must have core independent intellectual property rights. The path of taking someone else's product, changing the logo, and daring to take on projects through wrapper/secondary development is no longer viable. Second, you must have actual implementation cases, and they must be "operable and replicable"—no matter how beautiful the PPT is, without real customers and a real live system, it doesn't count. Third, in the past three years there must be no major safety, environmental, or quality accidents, and you must not be on the list of severely dishonest entities.
There is another sentence that is easily overlooked: applicant entities must "value R&D investment." This is precisely filtering out pure sales-oriented companies and retaining those that truly make products.
Why should businesses care about a document written for service providers
Because choosing a service provider is the most error-prone part of a digital project.
If you choose the wrong generation of software, it can still be remedied; if you choose the wrong implementation partner, the project stalls, data gets scattered, and the team becomes alienated—and the cost of starting over is double. Inside small and medium-sized enterprises, there is often no one who can judge whether a vendor truly has real capability—salespeople speak persuasively and can rattle off case studies at will.
Provincial-level selection is equivalent to the official side doing a round of due diligence for you first: intellectual property checked, cases checked, credit records checked. Although entering the pool doesn't mean it's necessarily good, it at least filters out the obviously unqualified ones.
This also connects with the policy thread in the first half of this year. When the provincial government issued the action plan for full-domain application of artificial intelligence in April, it specifically named the "Yuezhifu" supply-demand matching platform. The logic at the time was: the government has funds and enterprises have demand, but what is missing in between is a group of reliable suppliers. The selection process is exactly filling this gap.
How can enterprises put this to use
Three steps.
Step one: after the third batch list is announced, check the "Yuezhifu" platform for empowerment resources in your industry, as the starting point for your selection candidate pool.
Step two: don't just look at the list; focus on verifying cases. The document requires applicants to provide implementation cases, and when enterprises contact service providers, they can directly ask for case details from the same industry and of the same scale—for service providers that have been included in the pool, their cases have been verified by the province, so the cost of padding them is much higher than that of verbal promotion.
Step 3: Use it in reverse. This list also tells you what kind of service model the government recognizes: one with intellectual property, with implemented cases, and able to calculate the cost reduction and efficiency improvement. It is not unreasonable for you to hold any service provider not included in the pool to the same standards.
By the way, a word on timing
The subsidy window for Guangzhou's pilot digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises will close on December 31 this year, while the provincial-level chain-based transformation and AI benchmark awards are also underway. The selection schedule for the service provider resource pool aligns with the funding window schedule—the government clearly hopes that when enterprises apply for subsidies, they can find compliant contractors in the pool to do the work.
If you're looking for a service provider, or aren't sure how to verify case studies, feel free to reach out. In this industry, knowing what questions to ask is more important than knowing who to look for.
