Tiejian Heavy Industry Changsha Tertiary Industry Park workshop. Photo by Guo Yudi

　　Zhu Zehuan
　　Starting the year with work and momentum! On January 5th, Changsha's 2023 major project observation and the 2024 first batch of major project commencement ceremony was held, with 121 major projects commencing simultaneously across the city.
　　This is a significant measure to implement the spirit of the Central Economic Work Conference and the plenary sessions of the Provincial and Municipal Committees, embodying the principle of 'early action, early start, early commencement'. Changsha has sounded the charge for high-quality development.
　　Looking at the 121 major projects launched this time, most of them are concentrated in advanced manufacturing, technological innovation, and other fields. Among them, there are many projects strengthening and supplementing the advanced manufacturing industry chain, revealing Changsha's determination to promote high-quality development—leading the construction of a modern industrial system through technological innovation. This goal is undoubtedly industrial development.
　　In the new year, how can Changsha better promote industrial development and further enhance the role of advanced manufacturing as the 'ballast stone' and 'guiding star' supporting the high-quality development of the city's economy and society? The achievements of Changsha's high-quality industrial development in 2023 offer a glimpse into the successful path.
　　Looking at Changsha's industrial achievements in 2023, the answer is clear: it has jumped to sixth place among the top 100 advanced manufacturing cities nationwide, ranked first in the top ten cities for new energy storage, and is among the top 20 smart manufacturing cities. It has also won a series of national honors, including the National Demonstration City for the 'Three Products' Strategy of the Consumer Goods Industry and the National Pilot City for Digital Transformation of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises...
　　This year, Changsha's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology focused on enterprises, industries, industrial chains, and industrial ecosystem synergy, achieving fruitful results. Data shows that from January to November 2023, the city's total industrial added value increased by 6.5% year-on-year, higher than the national and provincial average. Industrial tax revenue increased by 9.2% year-on-year, and in the first three quarters, the added value of manufacturing accounted for 28% of the city's GDP, further amplifying the 'ballast stone' and 'guiding star' effect of manufacturing.
　　Graded Cultivation: Integrated Development of Large, Medium, and Small Enterprises
　　Hundreds of billions of industrial enterprises are a concrete manifestation of the quality of economic development and industrial strength of a region. Behind a hundreds of billions of industrial enterprise, it can drive a large number of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises to develop together, forming a growth pole that drives economic growth. Currently, Changsha is expected to have 20 such growth poles, ranking first among provincial capitals in central China.
　　Zhongwei New Energy is the first enterprise in Hunan Province with an annual output value exceeding 10 billion yuan in the field of energy storage materials. There are many local advanced energy storage material enterprises gathered upstream and downstream of Zhongwei New Energy. "The company currently has two core products." A person in charge of Zhongwei New Energy proudly introduced that one is "tricobalt tetroxide," a national-level manufacturing single-item champion product. It is the core material for preparing the cathode material of cobalt acid lithium batteries; the other is ternary precursor, which is the core material for preparing ternary lithium battery cathodes and is widely used in new energy vehicles and energy storage.
　　To achieve high-quality development of manufacturing, the high-end of production equipment is a hard bone to crack. Hunan Zhongda Chuangyuan CNC Equipment Co., Ltd.'s self-developed fully CNC spiral bevel gear dry-cutting CNC machine tool has taken the lead.
　　"The performance of our fully CNC spiral bevel gear dry-cutting CNC complete equipment is comparable to the world's leading level, while the price is only 60% of imported products, so it is favored by major domestic manufacturers, with a market share as high as 90%. "The person in charge of Zhongda Chuangyuan introduced that the equipment can significantly reduce production time, optimize production efficiency, and significantly improve key aspects such as precision, reliability, and green intelligent manufacturing. This set of equipment has also won the title of manufacturing single-item champion product.
　　According to statistics, Changsha currently has 26 national-level manufacturing single-item champion enterprises, ranking first among cities in central China. The market share of single-item products of enterprises such as Lens Technology, Shengxiang Bio, and Xingbang Intelligent are among the top in the world.
　　To cultivate more manufacturing single-item champion enterprises, in the second half of 2023, Changsha held four training camps for small and medium-sized enterprises to advance to manufacturing single-item champion incubation. Each session attracted about 80 business managers from high-quality small and medium-sized enterprises to actively participate. It is reported that the activity focuses on the actual needs of growth-oriented enterprises, focusing on "corporate capital strategic planning, corporate management and operation, international market layout, intellectual property protection", etc., through "expert lectures, practical exercises, case analysis, corporate study tours" and other forms, providing solutions to bottlenecks encountered in enterprise development, guiding small and medium-sized enterprises to take the path of "specialized, refined, and new" development, and driving more high-quality enterprises to move towards manufacturing single-item champion enterprises.
　　Promoting the specialized, refined, and new development of small and medium-sized enterprises depends on services and core cultivation. In 2023, Changsha continued to increase service guidance and policy support for small and medium-sized enterprises in innovation and research and development, intellectual property rights, quality brand building, listing financing, and market expansion, promoting the specialized, refined, and new development of small and medium-sized enterprises. The city added 48 national-level "specialized, refined, and new" small giant enterprises, bringing the total to 185.
　　"Through the establishment of a full-life-cycle enterprise cultivation system, we adhere to the working mechanisms such as the normalized working mechanism of thousands of cadres connecting with thousands of enterprises and the normalized working mechanism of Changsha's enterprise assistance, promoting the formation of a vibrant situation where large enterprises are 'reaching for the sky and standing firm on the ground' and small and medium-sized enterprises are 'covering the sky and the earth'." A person in charge of the Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology introduced that since the implementation of Changsha's long-term enterprise assistance mechanism, relying on the public service platform of Changsha Enterprise Service Center, a total of 440 enterprise problems have been solved.
　　Transformation and Upgrading: Promoting the Improvement and Efficiency of Traditional Industries
　　Strive to build a national important advanced manufacturing highland. New industrialization is an urgent need for Changsha's high-quality development under the new situation. Traditional industries are the foundation of the modern industrial system and cannot be simply withdrawn as low-end industries, but should insist on promoting the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries.
　　Intelligence is one of the paths to promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries. In 2023, Changsha deeply implemented the "Intelligent Empowerment of Ten Thousand Enterprises" action, adding 210 intelligent manufacturing enterprises, 310 intelligent manufacturing production lines (workshops), and 2026 intelligent workstations. Six factories and 24 scenarios were listed on the list of 2023 national intelligent manufacturing demonstration factories and excellent scenarios.
　　Why can intelligence become a key means of "improving quality" traditional industries? A visit to the Bosch Changsha production workshop located in Changsha Economic and Technological Development Zone will provide the answer: AGV logistics vehicles slide flexibly close to the ground, unmanned forklifts automatically complement and cooperate with loading and unloading when they arrive at the delivery point, production equipment is busy operating on the side, and ABS anti-lock brake motors are coming off the assembly line on the conveyor belt... In this global "lighthouse factory", automated equipment plays an absolute leading role in production.
　　"Compared with traditional production lines, production efficiency has increased by 30%, quality loss has been reduced by 30%, the number of operators has been reduced by 80%, and the changeover time has also been reduced by 30%. At the same time, the equipment also records various parameters of each processing process, bringing us valuable data wealth." Zhang Bisheng, production technology director of Bosch Changsha factory, introduced.
　　Smart factories offer more than just increased production efficiency. To better meet customer needs, Bosch Changsha independently developed an AI-driven production energy management system. This system combines customer needs, production plans, weather conditions, temperature and humidity, and other business and environmental factors to provide a rolling forecast of production line energy consumption and production scheduling for the next 7 days. With hourly prediction accuracy, the mean absolute percentage error is below 3.2%. It is reported that this system has helped Bosch Changsha factory reduce its annual electricity consumption by 18% and carbon dioxide emissions by 14%.
　　The biopharmaceutical industry is hailed as a "never-fading sunrise industry" and is one of the typical representatives of industrial transformation and upgrading. In recent years, Changsha's biopharmaceutical industry, especially the pharmaceutical equipment industry, has shown frequent highlights of development.
　　In the consumable production workshop of Aowei Technology, automated production lines are neatly arranged. A robotic arm picks up four 3cm long and 1cm wide transparent glass slides and precisely places them into the slots of a black tray. After repeating this several times, a box of counting plates can enter the next production stage.
　　"Except for the final packaging stage which requires some manual labor, all other production processes can be automated." A workshop official told reporters that as a pilot enterprise for intelligent manufacturing in Changsha, Aowei Technology's consumable workshop only needs dozens of people to meet the annual production task of over 100 million yuan.
　　While deploying intelligent production lines, Aowei Technology is also continuously improving the technological content of its products. In the past, medical testing of urine, feces, and blood samples had a low degree of automation, relying on manual operations, including manual sampling, reagent addition, microscopic observation, manual recording, and conclusion-drawing. Aowei Technology took the lead in applying artificial intelligence and machine vision technology to the morphological testing of clinical pathological specimens, filling the technological gap in the field of automated morphological testing of international medical microscopes and changing the history of clinical medical microscopic testing mainly relying on manual microscopic examination.

As an automotive parts company, Songer continuously promotes industrial upgrading and innovation in the upstream and downstream of the industry. Photo by Wang Zhiwei

　　Chain Development Creates a Win-Win Situation for Industrial Enterprises
　　To promote the development of the industrial economy, manufacturing enterprises are the focal point. For early manufacturing enterprises, differences in product positioning and areas of expertise laid the groundwork for later integration of upstream and downstream industries and the realization of a chain-style industrial development model.
　　As early as 2017, Changsha identified 22 emerging and advantageous industrial chains, including engineering machinery and aerospace (including Beidou), thus launching the city's industrial chain construction work.
　　In 2023, Changsha, combining with the actual situation of industrial development, integrated the original 22 industrial chains into 17. This adjustment not only effectively resolves the homogenized competition among industries in the same field, but also gathers the synergy of industrial development to achieve high-quality development together.
　　For example, the original automobile industry chain was split into new energy vehicle industry chain and intelligent networked vehicle industry chain. In the past two years, the new energy vehicle market has expanded rapidly. This round of restructuring is conducive to the precise policy-making of Changsha's automobile industry, targeted support and cultivation. On the one hand, it consolidates the advantageous industry of new energy vehicles, and on the other hand, it lays out the future industry of intelligent networked vehicles, which is the focus of development in the entire city.
　　The adjusted automotive industry chain has accelerated into the fast lane. At the opening ceremony and investment promotion conference of Changsha Automotive Parts Industrial Park in 2023, 20 complete vehicle and supporting projects were signed on site, with a planned total investment of 12.4 billion yuan, significantly improving the level of industrial supporting facilities.
　　The establishment of Changsha Automotive Parts Industrial Park focuses on the weak links and broken links of the automotive parts industry chain, continuously making efforts and focusing on introduction, which has benefited many companies. Taking BAIC Foton Changsha Super Truck Factory as an example, so far, the company has developed and introduced 59 localized suppliers, completed the development of more than 30 parts procurement modules, and realized local supply of parts such as cargo boxes, front and rear axles, and chassis.
　　"In the past, it was 'cars coming from east, west, north, and south,' but they were all 'playing their own drums and singing their own songs.'
　　Kong Zhaoyang, secretary of the party committee of BAIC Foton Changsha factory area, said that when Changsha built the development of the Changsha automobile industry chain, it specifically launched the Changsha Automotive Parts Industrial Park, which is a great benefit to complete vehicle enterprises. In the future, we (Changsha) want to introduce superior resources, including core parts enterprises, into the Changsha park to increase the degree of enterprise aggregation, reduce production costs, and improve industrial competitiveness. "Our goal is to strive for a 50% localization rate by 2025, drive the extension of the upstream and downstream industrial chain, attract more high-quality parts enterprises, and contribute to the growth, strength, and optimization of the Changsha automobile industry chain."
　　The benefits of connecting the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain are not limited to the automotive industry. "Positive electrode materials account for 40% of our production materials. Fortunately, there are local enterprises that can provide similar products in the local industrial chain." Peng Peng, chairman of Hunan Huaxing, an advanced energy storage material enterprise, told reporters that the positive electrode materials used by Hunan Huaxing were originally provided by a manufacturing enterprise in Jingzhou, Hubei. Previously, due to the impact of the epidemic, the Hubei supplier suspended supply. In an emergency, the company promptly adjusted its strategy and now it is supplied by a company in Ningxiang High-tech Zone. "Transportation costs have decreased, and communication is more efficient."
　　Hunan Huaxing's experience is just a microcosm of Changsha's advanced energy storage materials industry. Since 2003, Changsha has begun to plan and lay out the advanced energy storage materials industry. Through connecting points into chains and gathering chains into groups, the industrial ecosystem has been continuously optimized, and then it was included in the "1+2+N" industrial cluster system for key cultivation. Up to now, the city has a total of 150 industry enterprises, ranking among the top in the country, of which nearly 80 are above-scale enterprises.
　　At the beginning of 2023, good news came from Changsha's advanced energy storage materials industry: In 2022, the output value of the advanced energy storage materials industrial cluster exceeded 100 billion yuan, and was ranked first among the "Top Ten Cities of New Energy Storage" by CCID Consulting.

Xingbang Intelligent specializes in the manufacturing of aerial work platform equipment. Photo by Wang Zhiwei

　Gathering Chains into Groups Cultivates a Favorable Industrial Ecosystem
　　In the process of integrated development and gathering chains into groups, Changsha has emerged a batch of high-end, intelligent, green, and world-class industrial clusters, such as the engineering machinery industrial cluster and the new generation of independent and secure computing system industrial cluster are competing to create world-class advanced manufacturing clusters; the high-end chemical raw material medicine industrial cluster in Liuyang City was selected as the national characteristic industrial cluster for small and medium-sized enterprises; and the Changzhutam advanced energy materials industrial cluster is competing to create a national advanced manufacturing cluster.
　　What is an advanced manufacturing cluster? Yao Jun, deputy director of the Planning Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, once said that an advanced manufacturing cluster is a high-level form of industrial division of labor and agglomeration development. The cluster gathers innovation chains, industrial chains, capital chains, and talent chains, forming close and efficient cooperation between upstream and downstream, a complete industrial ecosystem, and strong radiation and driving capabilities. It can play an important role in improving the quality of supply, enhancing the stability and competitiveness of industrial chains and supply chains, and supporting the construction of a new development pattern.
　　Taking the Changsha next-generation independent and secure computing system cluster, a national-level advanced manufacturing industry cluster, as an example, the cluster currently has 1400 enterprises, including 734 above-scale enterprises, and its industrial scale accounts for 35.2% of the national total. It is worth mentioning that, as the only "computing industry" cluster among the 45 national-level advanced manufacturing industry clusters in the country, its cluster construction achievements and experience have influenced the development of the national independent innovation industry. Surrounding this industrial cluster, Changsha has made concerted efforts in terms of industrial chain, supply chain, capital chain, talent chain, and innovation chain to promote the "integration of five chains" and cultivate a superior industrial ecosystem.
　　Hunan YunChang Network Technology Co., Ltd., located in Yuhua District, is a high-tech enterprise that has been deeply involved in the computing industry for many years. The company owns 8 invention patents and 65 copyrights, and has undertaken municipal and district-level scientific research projects many times. In 2021, the company entered a period of rapid growth, but its light-asset attributes caused its working capital to be stretched thin.
　　After learning about the company's situation, the Municipal Industry and Information Technology Bureau quickly arranged for the Municipal Enterprise Service Center and the wind compensation fund operating agency, Hao Rongtong, to connect with the company, successively providing the company with a 5 million yuan credit loan, and effectively providing support to the company in times of need. "The funds injected at a critical moment have become the main driving force for the company's rapid development." A YunChang Technology official revealed that in the year the funds were injected, the company's revenue increased by 155% year-on-year.
　　In terms of talent cultivation, Changsha has the only academician workstation of Academician Fang Binxing of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and has established the Fang Ban Network Security Talent Education Service Center, initiated the establishment of the China Cyberspace Security Talent Education Alliance, conducted training and empowerment for universities and enterprises across the country, provided high-quality network security technical talents for employers, and provided network security talent skills identification services.
　　While cooperating to cultivate students, the Fang Binxing Academician Workstation also uses methods such as running demonstration classes and jointly building professional programs to coordinate, expand, and empower educational resources in the national network security field, accelerating the growth and replication of models of China's network security talents.
　　If industrial clusters are the "metaphysical" industrial ecosystem, then industrial parks are the "real" "nature" of industrial development. According to statistics, Changsha's parks, with about 2% of the city's total land area and 32% of the developable land, concentrate 53% of the city's above-scale industrial enterprises, 61% of high-tech enterprises, 75% of the scale of industrial output value, and 71% of tax revenue.
　　In 2023, Changsha further gave play to the role of parks as the main position, main battlefield, and main force, promoting the in-depth implementation of the construction of "five good" parks, using park construction to consolidate the development carrier of manufacturing, and promoting the high-quality development process of the city's industries. According to statistics, from January to November 2023, the growth rate of the added value of the scale of industrial enterprises in the city's parks reached 10.9%, 4.4 percentage points higher than the average growth rate of the whole city.
　　Looking back on the past is to better develop the future. Looking back on 2023, Changsha's foundation for development lies in industry, and its advantage lies in industry. Looking forward to 2024, Changsha's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will continue to focus on enterprises, industries, industrial chains, industrial clusters, and industrial ecosystems, in-depth implementation of the "year of doubling industrial efficiency and effectiveness" and the "year of fulfilling responsibilities and striving for excellence" activities, making every effort to stabilize growth, expanding external and internal connections to increase momentum, striving by every means to move up to a higher level, and cautiously guarding the bottom line, helping Changsha's industry reach new heights.