Guizhou's manufacturing industry enters new chapter

Transitioning from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing," the industrial sector in Southwest China's Guizhou province heralds a new era of development.

The total output value of Guizhou's new energy battery and materials industry above a designated size surged from 12 billion yuan ($1.64 billion) in 2020 to 69.5 billion yuan in 2023, emerging as a key driver fueling rapid industrial growth across the province.

With a 95 percent automation rate, CATL's Guizhou factory can currently produce one battery cell per second and one battery pack every 2.5 minutes, demonstrating remarkable efficiency gains.

The project aims to establish a production base with an annual capacity of 60 GWh for power and energy storage batteries, supporting both lithium iron phosphate and ternary cathode products. The products from the Guizhou facility will cater to European clients such as Volkswagen and Peugeot.

"To achieve digitalized factory operations, we have built a cloud-based virtual factory using big data, transforming the factory into an evolvable AI entity. By enhancing production line transparency, leveraging digital tools to boost efficiency, and pursuing improvements in both capacity and quality, we have reduced production costs by 42 percent and shortened production cycles by 50 percent," stated a representative of CATL's Ningde base.

Meanwhile, at Geely's Guizhou manufacturing base in the Guanshanhu Modern Industrial Park in Guiyang, digitization has transformed the automotive production facility into a highly efficient and intelligent hub.

For such intricate and precise manufacturing processes, the emphasis is on intelligent production at the manufacturing base.

The base integrates the concept of deep fusion between big data and manufacturing, combining industrial robots, intelligent equipment, and information systems.

It adheres to world-class standards for intelligent factories, making it an integrated intelligent factory combining intelligence, digitization, and information technology and capable of simultaneously producing five vehicle models on mixed lines.

The Guiyang base has an annual production capacity of 300,000 vehicles, with a daily output of 822 vehicles. The Galaxy E5, the first pure electric model produced at the Guiyang base, has been successfully put into production, ensuring prompt delivery upon market release.