Big data advances industrial upgrading in Guiyang

Robots manufacture products at a workshop of an equipment manufacturer in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou province, March 31, 2021. (People's Daily Online/Shang Yujie)

Big data technology is facilitating the upgrading and transformation of several enterprises in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou province.

As the core region of China's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone, Guiyang is taking smart manufacturing as a focal point to replace old growth drivers with new ones and promote high-quality development of its economy.

Through big data, more and more enterprises in the city have completed the transition from traditional to intelligent manufacturing.

A Traditional Chinese medicine preparations workshop of a pharmaceutical enterprise in Guiyang's Wudang district is a beneficiary of digitalization. A production procedure that called for close cooperation of tens of adept workers in the past is now finished by robotic arms.

Digitalization has not only lifted the production capacity of the enterprise by 1.1 billion capsules per year, but also enabled whole-process traceable management covering raw material supply, production and the consumer end.

Guizhou Hangyu Technology Development Co., Ltd. is a private firm engaged in the production of forged rings. Relying on manual operation in the past for the controlling of furnace temperature, it always saw unsuccessful forging, which caused both a waste of materials and a decrease in production efficiency.

Four years ago, the firm became one of the first enterprises in Guiyang to pilot industrial upgrading, and started building a digitalized smart plant in cooperation with multiple research institutions and universities.

"Our production efficiency improved by over 55 percent, and the utilization rate of materials surged fourfold," said Liu Zhaohui, vice general manager of the company, adding that 99 percent of the products rolling off the production line are qualified, up from 88 percent.

Thanks to the improved fineness and the intellectualization of the company, its products are now exported to the UK, South Korea, Italy and Sweden. The company is one of the very few forge piece manufacturers in Asia-Pacific region that are qualified to supply the six major commercial aero-engine producers in the world.

It is reported that over 85 percent of the enterprises above designated size in Guiyang have employed cloud service. The city's integration index of big data with the real economy reached 51.1, which marks that Guiyang is marching toward a higher level of big data-real economy integration.

While transforming its traditional industries, Guiyang is also building three industrial clusters centering on big data centers, electronic information manufacturing and software and information technology services, each of which will be worth at least 100 billion yuan ($15.5 billion).

The Big Data Expo Avenue, also known as Shubo Avenue, which stretches 62 kilometers in Guiyang, is an important carrier for the city's big data industry. Multiple smart transport projects, including intelligent parking and autopilot, have been tested and applied there.

By 2020, it has introduced 119 investment projects on big data, as well as 171 big data enterprises, such as China Electronics Corporation, China International Intellectech Group, and Tencent Cloud. As planned, the revenue of digital industrialization and industrial digitalization in Shubo Avenue is expected to hit a trillion yuan in 2035.

Apart from gathering a series of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, including Huawei and Tencent, Guiyang also nurtured a batch of local digital economy players, such as Esgyn, Full Truck Alliance, Longmaster and Baishan Cloud.

Chen Yan, mayor of Guiyang noted that the city would vigorously advance new infrastructure construction in the next five years, and build big data industry, application, standard, regulation and safety systems on a higher level, so as to push forward with new industrialization led by the big data sector and features high economic return, low resource consumption, low environmental impacts and high exploitation of human resources.