Manufacturing in Anhui: Advancing Towards Higher-Quality Development through Transformation and Upgrading

HEFEI, China, Sept. 22, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- In recent years, Anhui, a province in eastern China, has been pursuing high-quality development across the entire spectrum of new industrialization and endeavoring  to make manufacturing become high-end, smart, and green.

In Ma'anshan City, significant changes have been taking place to the city's economic mainstay steel industry. With expanded product catalogue and application of more scientific and technological innovations, the steel products have successfully entered into high-end market and added value of the steel products has seen a dramatic increase. Baowu Group Masteel Rail Transit Materials Technology Co., Ltd., a leading enterprise in Ma'anshan, has mastered core technologies for manufacturing wheels for high-speed trains, and also established  an advanced and stable manufacturing system. The company's premium axle products have been exported to over 70 countries and regions worldwide.

Lighthouse factories, assessed  by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, have been considered as pacesetters in the intelligent and digital transformation of the global manufacturing sector. Anhui is home to five such lighthouses, ranking third in the country. One of them is the Hefei Haier COSMO Intelligent Control Interconnected Factory. The factory has reduced the time required for its standard operating procedure (SOP) from three to four hours to less than three seconds by employing a virtual industrial engineer. This virtual engineer is capable of making real-time adjustments and selecting the best one from thousands of solutions, resulting in a 30 percent increase in efficiency.

More than 80 percent of industrial enterprises above designated size in Anhui Provnince have launched their digital transformation. Over 50 percent of them have achieved digital transformation. The new landscape of intelligent manufacturing is taking shape at a fast pace.

Tongling City located in central Anhui Province is the home to the  first copper industrial base of the People's Republic of China. In the workshop of the Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Co., Ltd. Jinguang Copper Branch, accompanied by the roar of machines, the slag generated in the production process is being recycled via a series of processes including slow-cooling, crushing, and screening. "Through technological upgrading and transformation, we can recover as many as 14,300 tonnes of copper metal a year, with total resources equivalent to the reserve of a medium-sized copper mine," said Wen Yan, general manager of the branch.

To accelerate the green development of the manufacturing sector, Anhui has taken comprehensive measures, namely, reducing output, controlling production capacity, and adjusting structure at the source; bolstering technological capabilities and energy efficiency in process control; setting models for  enterprises and driving recycling in the end-of-pipe treatment. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), the energy consumption per unit of the added value for industrial enterprises above designated size in Anhui decreased by 20.05 percent. Currently, 80 percent of national-level industrial parks and 75 percent of provincial-level industrial parks have completed recycling transformation.