MANY businesses in Shenzhen, where a lot of the world’s high-tech gadgets are made, don’t fear for their future in the face of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to compel Apple Inc. and others to manufacture more at home, a Wall Street Journal report said Wednesday.

    They told the U.S. newspaper that the economic forces that transformed this once-poor Guangdong Province backwater into a sea of skyscrapers are too massive to be rolled back. Even if Trump imposes tariffs on Chinese-made goods, as he has threatened to do, it’s now so efficient to engineer, produce and ship electronics from Shenzhen that it could still outcompete the United States, they said.

    Once a sleepy border town, today Shenzhen is the sprawling epicenter of China’s consumer-electronics industry, the country’s top export, the paper said. At two of Shenzhen’s Foxconn Technology Group factories, some 230,000 workers make gear for Apple and global rivals, including Chinese communications giant Huawei Technologies Co., which is headquartered in Shenzhen.

    “We are very relaxed about all the talk of tariffs, although the noise it creates is not good,” said a senior executive at a global consumer-electronics firm with operations in Shenzhen, who spoke anonymously to avoid entering the debate over Trump’s proposals.

    Although Shenzhen’s global competitiveness has limits, it has weathered economic shifts before, the report said.

    In 1979, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping named Shenzhen a special economic zone where market forces would have freer rein, sparking more than a decade of 40-percent annual growth as a low-cost manufacturing hub. Concerned textiles were becoming a dead end, Shenzhen brought in national universities to produce a higher-skilled workforce. In recent years, the city’s economy has averaged 13 percent growth, according to official data — which is more than the national rate.

    The city found a comparative advantage in assembling smartphones and other devices using a supply chain of specialized parts made in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Shenzhen’s army of university-trained engineers made it a global center for product prototyping.

    Mock-ups that take weeks to produce in the United States can be done in a day for a fraction of the cost in Shenzhen, according to Duncan Turner, a venture capitalist who helps run Hax Accelerator in Shenzhen, a workspace that sponsors inventors from around the world.

    “Shenzhen was known for making things cheap, then it was known for making things well,” said Turner, whose firm sits in Huaqiangbei, the biggest marketplace for electronics and digital products in China. “Now, anyone who wants to prototype anything does it here.”

    The growth rate of Shenzhen’s manufacturing has slowed while sectors like software and scientific research are surging ahead. Industry grew 7.5 percent in 2015, while research spending accounted for 4.05 percent of the local GDP. 

    The proportion of Shenzhen’s economy related to industries such as manufacturing fell 7 percentage points during that period, while information technology and research grew by 3 percentage points, according to the 2015 Shenzhen Statistical Yearbook.

    The shift is easy to see. In the city’s manufacturing outskirts, more concrete factory bays are becoming vacant, while neighborhoods of gleaming office buildings are sprouting up in the high-tech districts.

    Globally competitive firms that rely on design and branding are taking root. Dajiang Innovations Science and Technology Co., among the world’s biggest makers of drones, based itself in Shenzhen to take advantage of the “access to the suppliers, raw materials, and the young, creative talent pool necessary for sustained success,” according to its website.

    Daimler AG joined Chinese car maker BYD Co. Ltd. in 2011 to develop an electric car in Shenzhen. Apple is opening a research and development center in the city, where some 100,000 programmers produce software for Apple’s operating system. In a nod to Shenzhen’s rise as an innovation center, Chinese Internet giants Baidu Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. have opened large offices.

    Some small manufacturers are shifting to design and branding. In two years, Qiwo Smartlink Technology Ltd. has transitioned from manufacturing cheap cameras and gizmos for other companies, to designing their own, with US$100 million in annual sales. “All the supply chains and related companies are here, I don’t think you can move this to the United States,” said James Guo, Qiwo’s head of exports.

    If anything, higher U.S. tariffs would accelerate economic trends already under way, Shenzhen business owners say. Shenzhen’s factories may leave -- but for low-wage provinces in China, not the United States. Meanwhile, the city will add more design, engineering and marketing jobs.