2023 Status of Industrial Automation Transformation in China

Media reports indicate that China’s automated production ranks fifth globally, ahead of the United States, demonstrating significant progress in the country’s push for the manufacturing industry to transition towards high-end manufacturing in recent years. This advancement will help alleviate the labor shortage problem in factories and promote the continued progression of Chinese manufacturing.

The report released by the International Federation of Robotics states that China now has 322 robots per 10,000 employees, while the United States has 274 robots per 10,000 employees, which is 15% less than China and trails behind China; in the global ranking, the countries ahead of China are South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Germany.

Many of China’s large enterprises are vigorously promoting industrial automation. Companies like Xiaomi and Foxconn have established so-called “lights-out factories,” which are fully automated factories where most manufacturing processes are completed by machines. China’s major logistics companies also heavily utilize robots for automated sorting at their distribution centers, highlighting Chinese enterprises’ enthusiasm for industrial automation.

In fact, industrial automation in China has reached a high degree of prevalence. Not only large enterprises are advancing automation, but small and medium-sized enterprises, and even workshop companies, are widely adopting automated or semi-automated machinery for production. This is because mechanized production can produce components of high precision and quality, thereby improving product quality.

China has become the world’s largest robot market. As the Chinese robotics market rapidly develops, many well-known overseas robotics companies have set up factories in China. At present, globally recognized robotics companies such as ABB and FANUC have established factories in China, and numerous Chinese robotics enterprises have also emerged.

According to the  2022-2027 China Industrial Automation Industry Market In-depth Research and Investment Strategy Forecast Report  by China Research and Intelligence.：

China has developed its manufacturing industry through processing with imported materials, and over the past 30 years, the country has gradually laid a solid foundation for manufacturing. By 2010, China had already become the world's largest manufacturer. However, as the Chinese manufacturing industry rose, the country gradually moved past the period of demographic dividend. Coupled with rising labor costs in China, this prompted a transformation of the manufacturing industry.

Since then, China's manufacturing industry began its transformation and upgrade, striving to shift towards high-end manufacturing. Such transformation naturally required the advancement of industrial automation. Industrial automation makes it possible to produce high-quality, standardized products and has enabled Chinese manufacturing to gradually shed the label of being cheap and low-end.

Over the past decade, thanks to concerted efforts, the proportion of high-tech industries in China's exports has steadily increased. Data from 2020 shows that China's high-tech export value reached 5.37 trillion yuan, accounting for 29.9% of that year's total export value, while the proportion of processing trade has dropped to just over 20%, lower than that of high-tech industries.

With the rise of China's high-tech industries, the country's trade surplus has also grown rapidly. The increase in the trade surplus has provided China with more funds to promote the transformation of its manufacturing industry, forming a virtuous cycle and ultimately propelling China's industrial automation to a leading global level, even surpassing the world's largest economy, the United States.

Applications of Machine Vision in Industrial Automation

After years of innovative development, China's technology has accumulated a series of high-tech, intelligent, and efficient application technologies, which are now being applied in the development of industrial production. Today's industry relies less on intensive human labor and more on technological and knowledge-based development. At the same time, improvements in production efficiency and innovation have become the primary driving forces for industrial development.

Particularly in an environment of high IoT and mobile internet coverage, an increasing number of intelligent devices are appearing in our lives. In this process, the realization of intelligent automation in industrial production and the enhancement of its intelligence level remain key points of focus. Furthermore, industrial intelligence is also a crucial link in achieving breakthroughs in national economic growth.

Nowadays, machine vision technology is widely used in various industries due to its precision, consistency, efficiency, and repeatability. It is highly favored in the field of intelligent development of modern industry. Building on computer vision technology, machine vision promotes the development of information technology engineering automation by perceiving the position, size, shape, color, and other information of objects. It uses optical devices and sensors to obtain target information, converts the captured image information into digital information readable by computers, analyzes it through the computer to display on electronic screens, and then delivers instructions to the machine to complete mechanical motions, hence a single processing cycle.

Machine vision is applied in fields such as artificial intelligence, signal processing, image processing, machine learning, and automation. It has reached a relatively mature stage and plays an especially prominent role in the field of industrial production.

Recognition and positioning control is one of the applications of machine vision in the industry. Modern factories generally require production machines to quickly and accurately locate target objects and their precise coordinates. To achieve this, they often use machine vision technology for positioning, and control robotic arms to grab the target objects, which is a simple yet commonly used function.

In identification using machine vision, image information is acquired and processed by the technology until various states of the target object can be recognized, achieving tracking and data collection of the target object, a process that requires full cooperation from industrial vision equipment.

Market Size of Industrial Automation Control Systems

With rapid economic development and the continuous increase in domestic labor costs, enterprises face growing pressures to survive. To reduce production costs and improve efficiency, the development of industrial control automation has become an irreversible trend. Reports indicate that there are 797 small industrial automation enterprises in China, accounting for 81.7% of the total number of such enterprises in the country. Based on the positive outlook for industrial automation control development, the market size of the control system device manufacturing industry is expected to exceed 350 billion yuan.

Despite the fact that domestic industrial automation enterprises in China are still behind their foreign counterparts in areas such as technology, branding, and product variety, the automation control market is gradually growing due to domestic advantages in cost, pricing, distribution, market segmentation expansion, and personalized services. In the first half of the previous year, the total assets in China's industrial automation field reached 212 billion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 14.9%.

Industry insiders express that the industrial automation market is very broad. It can involve any manufacturing industry that uses different production cycles with control systems and automated processing systems, and it is applied to many different end markets. Today, industrial automation is widely used in many different manufacturing industries in China, but the industrial automation market itself is still in the early stages of development, with great potential and room for growth. Looking at the overall environment, the prospects for the development of China's industrial automation market are very bright, and energy-efficient precision manufacturing is the direction of future development.

With the emergence of higher-precision sensors and the ability for longer-distance and faster communication, many advancements have been made in the industrial control market, such as real-time sensing and response measures on production lines, misplaced sensing, and corrective responses. Nowadays, many jobs that previously could not be automated due to the lack of precision of sensory components have now been automated. Industry researchers analyze, "The transition to an intelligent, interconnected, responsive world has already formed, and industrial automation is one of the first areas to become widespread." Environmental light sensors, motion sensors, light sensors, distance sensors, and image sensors are among the main components. Secondly, connectivity features, including both wired and wireless connections, are essential.

As competition in the industrial automation industry intensifies, large enterprises are increasingly engaged in mergers, acquisitions, integration, and capital operations. Excellent industrial automation enterprises at home and abroad are paying more and more attention to the analysis and research of the industry market, especially to in-depth research on current market environment and customer demand trends, in order to gain early market entry and secure a competitive advantage. Consequently, a large number of outstanding brands have risen rapidly and become leaders in the industry.