Home appliance industry is at the forefront of "China's smart manufacturing"

China's manufacturing industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation and upgrading. This comprehensive digital and intelligent exploration is technology intensive, massive and unprecedented in scale. Once successful, it will enable China's manufacturing industry to transform and upgrade into a new Internet of Things intelligent industry on a large scale and inject more powerful impetus into China's economy.

With this transformation and upgrading, China's home appliance industry has once again been at the forefront, taking the lead in carrying the banner of "China's intelligent manufacturing".

Reviewing the development history of China's home appliance industry, it is not difficult to find that China's home appliance industry has always been at the forefront of marketization, and its transformation and development in the manufacturing field has also been at the forefront of the industry. At the early stage, China's home appliance market was dominated by foreign brands in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea, and the products and technologies were led by foreign brands.

China's home appliance industry seized the opportunities of technology iteration such as fluorine free, frequency conversion and liquid crystal, actively integrated the upstream and downstream industrial chains, continued to increase investment in research and development, continued to carry out product and technical innovation, and devoted itself to cultivating domestic high-end brands. China's home appliance market has gradually become dominated by domestic brands.

While stabilizing the domestic market, China's home appliance industry is also striving to expand overseas markets, create a global brand, and take the lead in becoming a "business card" made in China. After becoming a world brand, China's home appliance industry did not stop, but explored various innovations and took the lead in the transformation and upgrading to intelligent manufacturing. Various advanced technologies were constantly applied in the research, development, design, manufacturing and other scenes of home appliances, subverting the traditional production methods of the home appliance industry.

In the process of continuous transformation and development, China's home appliance industry has accumulated a strong industrial capacity: it not only includes a mature industrial base, a deep manufacturing base, and a large number of trained industrial workers, but also is the first large-scale exploration of digitalization, intelligence, and networking in the manufacturing industry, which has formed a solid foundation for digitalization and intelligent transformation. Take Gree for example.

Only in the field of industrial products, Gree has its own compressor factory, its own mold factory, and its own industrial robot, which firmly holds the independent research and development of core parts in its own hands.

Nowadays, Gree intelligent equipment not only serves the enterprise itself, but also has spillover effects from its automation transformation experience, providing more and more industries with advanced intelligent equipment and full process systematic solutions.

In the fierce market competition, China's home appliance industry has honed its competitiveness which cannot be underestimated. The time line was pulled back to the turn of the century, when Chinese household appliance enterprises were just starting to make efforts and Chinese and foreign brands were facing each other head-on.

Especially at that time, foreign enterprises began to set up R&D centers in China, and cut prices to seize market share. However, the household appliance industry did not set the foreign equity ratio limit as the automobile industry did, and China's household appliance industry suddenly stood in the foreground of global competition.

However, China's home appliance industry has withstood the test of fierce competition and has become the first industry to win in the global competition for China's manufacturing industry. Today, as the world's largest producer and marketer of household appliances, China's production of air conditioners and microwave ovens accounts for more than 70% of the world's total, while refrigerators and washing machines account for more than 50%; China's household appliances cover 160 countries and regions around the world, serving more than 2 billion user families around the world. The vast majority of them are private brands and technologies, and their global competitiveness is in the forefront.

According to the data released by the General Administration of Customs, the export volume of China's household appliances in 2021 will be 98.72 billion US dollars, with the export scale and growth rate hitting a new decade high.

More importantly, as the leader of the transformation from traditional industry to digital industry, there is no doubt that China's household appliance industry has strong innovation ability. Driven by the leading enterprises, innovation has become the label of the household appliances industry.

According to Dong Mingzhu, the chairman of Gree Electric, "to promote the transformation from Made in China to Created in China, from China's speed to Chinese quality, and from Chinese products to Chinese brands", it is under the guidance of this goal that Gree has clearly defined and strengthened the innovation attributes and scope of the enterprise. Every core technology research and development has adhered to independent innovation and independent talent training, Now Gree has nearly 16000 R&D personnel and more than 30000 technical workers, reaching the international leading level in the fields of compressors, optical air storage systems, intelligent equipment, etc.

Like a catfish with profound skills, whenever China's home appliance industry "crosses the border" into a new field, that field opens up a new imagination space. However, China's home appliance industry is not a market disrupter, but a large-scale connection with market demand and industrial chain with strong industrial, competitive and innovative capabilities, so that the industry will be optimized and new industrial competitiveness will be born.