HUAWEI Technologies Co. Ltd. said Monday that it has no plan to move its headquarters out of Shenzhen in response to rumors claiming the technology giant will ditch the city due to its soaring property prices and labor costs.

    Huawei said in a statement on its official website that the rumors spread over the weekend are “not true.”

    “Huawei has been setting up all kinds of branches and research institutions across China and even in overseas markets since a couple of years ago to better support the company’s global expansion,” said the statement. “During the process, it is a normal business practice to adjust the responsibility of different entities.”

    An article titled “Don’t Let Huawei Leave” went viral online over the weekend, which revealed that the government of Longgang District, where Huawei is headquartered, has voiced concern in an official report that local tax revenue and the economy would suffer a heavy blow if the company moves out. Longgang’s industrial output value would drop 14 percent if Huawei left, according to the report.

    The article speculated that the company is bothered by rising property prices and labor costs in Shenzhen. In 2015, home prices in Longgang soared 40 percent.

    In 2012, Huawei invested more than 10 billion yuan in the purchase of a 1,900-mu (126.77-hectare) piece of land in Dongguan to set up the device manufacturing and research headquarters. It has since injected an increasing amount of investment into the city, one of Shenzhen’s neighbors.

    According to reports in Chinese media, the land is located to the south of Songshan Lake. The land rights period is 50 years.

    According to Huawei Device’s plans, the company will invest about 10 billion yuan in the construction of the headquarters, which will focus on research and development, sales, and value-added services. The project will include the company’s research and development office center and a high-end training center.

    It is reported that the Dongguan government has promised the company more land in the future. Huawei owns 2,460 mu of land in Shenzhen.

    This is not the first time Huawei built a plant in Dongguan. In 2005, the company set up a company at Songshan Lake, building a base for network communications product manufacturing and distribution in southern China.

    By 2015, the output of Huawei’s Dongguan branch reportedly surpassed 100 billion yuan and it contributed taxes of about 2 billion yuan to Dongguan, the biggest taxpayer in the city.(SD News)