Digitalisation is rebuilding Chinese manufacturing across the board. The case numbers are concrete: a textile mill’s staffing per 10,000 spindles fell from 50 to under 15 with production efficiency up 50% after an industrial internet retrofit; a hot rolling line at Ansteel cut emergency stops and fault repairs by 20% and lifted operating efficiency 5%; a furniture firm’s intelligent decision system turns out more than 6,000 customised designs with one-click design, quote, order and production, halving delivery time; and a Shanxi coal mine runs 100 kilometres of tunnels on a 5G private network with inspection robots, HD monitoring and remote operation.
The national picture
By the end of 2021, the numerical-control rate on key processes in industrial firms reached 55.3% and digital R&D design tools 74.7% — up 30.7 and 25.9 points respectively from 2012 — while digital penetration in business management hit 70.9%.
The applications go beyond the factory. At the Winter Olympics curling venue, layered sensors held ice temperature at minus 6C and ice thickness between 5 and 6 centimetres, cutting energy use 30%. The platform behind it has grown to 19 industrial apps and 6 cloud services serving 150 enterprises with 54,000 connected devices.
Geely’s Changxing plant runs a fully traceable final assembly line — every bolt torque logged over 5G — as part of a zero-deviation, 100%-automated welding, zero-pollution, 100%-data-traceable production system. Zhejiang province has certified 423 smart factories and 61 ‘future factories’, with production efficiency up 47.8%, energy utilisation up 16.3% and operating costs down 20.4%. Liaoning set up a RMB 2 billion fund, put nearly 20,000 industrial firms on the cloud and completed 109 smart manufacturing projects, with efficiency up 21.2% and costs down 15.6% on average. Nationally, 110 smart manufacturing demonstration factories and 241 excellent scenarios were named for 2021.
The SME frontier
The harder half is small and medium firms. A bearing plant in Xinchang put one worker on two production lines after deepening a 2017 information upgrade, doubling capacity with no new equipment or headcount and passing RMB 100 million in annual output. The local bearing industrial internet platform now connects 20,000 devices across 300-plus firms, lifting equipment output 13% and cutting staffing 50%.
Nationally, platforms with regional or industry influence exceed 100, connecting 76 million devices, aggregating over 590,000 industrial apps and serving 1.6 million industrial enterprises. The plan for this year: more than 100 platforms and service providers delivering transformation assessments and solutions to no fewer than 100,000 SMEs, and moving 100,000 onto the cloud by year end — with low-cost, quick-payoff solutions designed for smaller firms rather than enterprise suites scaled down.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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