Exclusive | ‘Made In China 2025’: a peek at the robot revolution under way in the hub of the ‘world’s factory’
In the second report in a series, He Huifeng and Celia Chen look at how Beijing's ambitious industrial plan aims to break China’s reliance on foreign technology and pull its hi-tech industries up to Western levels
Amid the sprawl of drab, dusty concrete factories in Shunde district in the southern Chinese city of Foshan, one gleaming new structure stands out.
The 40,000 square metre (430,000 square feet) factory, designed by an American architect, cost 120 million yuan (US$17.5 million) to build and is expected to triple Jaten Robot & Automation’s annual production to 10,000 robots.
Just a few miles away, work is under way on an 800,000 square metre, 10 billion yuan industrial estate that will house three ventures between Chinese appliance maker Midea and German robotics firm Kuka, which Midea bought in 2016. The new complex will have the annual capacity to produce 75,000 industrial robots by 2024.
Jaten and Midea are among the biggest players helping to make Foshan – a city of 7 million people best known as the home of the Cantonese style of lion dance and kung fu – the hub of China’s robotics industry.
Under the Chinese government’s “Made in China 2025” industrial master plan, the number of industrial automatons operating in the country would expand tenfold to 1.8 million units by 2025, when up to 70 per cent of the robots used in China would be made in the country, from half in 2020, and 30 per cent now.
It’s an ambitious, multibillion-dollar pursuit. Sitting on the western bank of the Pearl River, with Guangzhou city to the north and Shenzhen to its east, Foshan is at the heart of southern China’s manufacturing industry.
