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Digitalization is the new fashion for Chinese enterprises
What can corn do in your wildest imagination? Has it ever occurred to you that the yellow kernels can become soccer jerseys?
Young Yusuf (pseudonym) has always believed that one day he could use his family-grown corn to create a #CristianoRonaldo jersey to brag to his friends about. But some Chinese companies are taking his dream a step further: they can actually make jerseys with corn.
Yusuf’s dream is ready to become a reality in his hometown of Wusu City, northwest China’s#Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where Chinese biotechnology company Cathay Industrial Biotech is based.
As Cathay’s newly invested site, the factory in Yusuf’s hometown will generate an annual output of 50 thousand tonnes of bio-based DN5, plus 100 thousand tonnes of bio-based polyamide and 30 thousand tonnes of LCDA.
Behind Cathay’s great ambition is no longer the traditional experience-based manufacturing – it’s all digital now. For example, the company’s pilot program alone is busy sifting through 500 thousand tissue cells before one is selected for mass production. With five million data points, the success rate is so low that it can even risk the mass production.
At the Industry Forum Siemens 2018 in Suzhou, east China’s Jiangsu province, Yusuf’s and Cathay’s story were widely echoed by Chinese enterprises that are going down the same path, whose choices came amid Cathay and others’ sparkling progress.
Even China’s largest ultra-deepwater drilling rig, “Blue Whale 1,” which used to be deployed in the #SouthChinaSea, uses digitalization to reduce maintenance costs by 50%, fuel consumption by 11%, and carbon dioxide emission by 20%.
All this came under cooperation with Siemens which, sitting on its century-old factory operation and digitalization experience, now takes special pride in its latest manufacturing simulation system called “Digital Twin,” which allows enterprises to calculate the best options for their operations in the virtual world before moving onto real production.
Another apple in the eye for Siemens as well as many Chinese enterprises is the cloud-based, open Internet of Things operating system “#MindSphere,” which will roll out in the Chinese mainland in cooperation with #Alibaba Cloud by the first quarter of 2019.
Data from McKinsey & Company’s survey on hundreds of CEOs from seven countries showed that 68% of the surveyed business leaders put digitalization on top of their work priority and the figure in #China was 87%, only second to #India, as both countries’ businesses have shown eagerness to jump on the digital wagon.
Similar to #AI, digitalization triggers the same fear among some people over the loss of jobs, especially as more enterprises show interest in developing a new competitive edge among fierce market competition.
Dismissing such concerns, Jan Michael Mrosik, CEO of the Digital Factory Division, #SiemensAG, told People’s Daily that digital factories would naturally change job profiles when more jobs become available for people who are better educated and can deal with digitalization – something enterprises should take a responsibility in.
“Digitalization saves jobs, because it makes companies competitive and it creates high-value jobs,” Mrosik stressed. (By Jiang Jie in Suzhou)
Read full article here: http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0920/c90000-9502314.html
