Shanghai is determined to consolidate its leading position in intelligent manufacturing by building 70 new intelligent factories this year, and 200 new intelligent factories and 20 benchmark factories by the end of 2025, official sources said. Some 70 new intelligent factories covering key industries, including automotive, high-end equipment and electronic information, will be built this year in an effort to optimize products, manufacturing procedures and various supply-chain processes, said Zhang Ying, Director of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization, during a smart factory construction promotion conference in Shanghai. The city is China's largest integrated solutions provider for intelligent manufacturing systems and one of the core equipment industrial clusters of intelligent manufacturing.
As manufacturing is critical for China’s overall development, intelligent manufacturing is vital in enhancing the core competitiveness of the nation’s industries. It also plays an important role in accelerating new industrialization, said Chen Jie, Vice Mayor of Shanghai. “Therefore, it is an inevitable choice for megacities like Shanghai to take smart factories as a key area for the digital transformation of the manufacturing sector, and to accelerate the construction of smart factories,” Chen said. “Shanghai has so far built 19 national-level smart factories, 100 municipal-level smart factories and more than 1,000 intelligent manufacturing applications. More than 70% of the city’s industrial enterprises above the designated size – with an annual revenue of more than CNY20 million – have conducted an intelligent factory evaluation,” said Zhang. Production efficiency of Shanghai’s intelligent factories has increased by more than 50% on average, while operational costs fell by more than 30% and energy consumption was down by nearly 14%.
Through accelerated cultivation of a batch of world-class intelligent manufacturing system integration businesses, Shanghai has seen this segment’s output value exceed CNY60 billion, while the industrial scale of the intelligent manufacturing equipment sector has surpassed CNY100 billion, Zhang said. For example, Shanghai’s current robot density in key industries is 383 units per 10,000 people, the highest worldwide, said Zhang. Robot density is a key gauge to measure the adoption of automation in manufacturing, and is expressed by the number of robots per 10,000 people working in the manufacturing industry.
“By laying out detailed plans for advanced manufacturing and modern services, Shanghai looks to strengthen in-depth integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation, promote a new model of industrialization and the high-quality development of key industrial chains, thereby serving as a role model for a modern industrial system led by technological innovation,” said Qian Feng, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), as reported by the China Daily.
