Shanghai’s Three-Year Plan to Push Automation

Shanghai will build more than 100 fully-automated factories and upgrade machinery in a large number of sectors.

Factory automation in Germany.

Shanghai, China’s largest commercial city, is going to speed up the development of innovative technology and automation between 2020 and 2022 with the aim of building up more than 100 innovative product brands.

Shanghai aims to achieve “100+” targets, which refers to the establishment of more than 100 innovative technology companies, launch 100+ new applications and 100+ brands of innovative products and services and 100+ breakthroughs in core technologies, according to the Shanghai Plan of Action for Promoting Online New Economic Development (2020-2022) released by the Shanghai municipal government on Monday.

Shanghai will build more than 100 fully-automated factories and upgrade the machinery, automobile, aviation and aerospace, biomedical, information technology, metal and chemical industries. The industrial upgrade will apply flexible, cloud and sharing manufacturing technologies and deploy a large amount of robots in production lines and warehouses.

The Chinese commercial and financial city encourages companies to use internet platforms to source their raw materials and sell their products. It aims to build 20 online industrial platforms that have nationwide influence. It also encourages people to work from home or mobile offices and hold video conferences. 

The city will promote online financial, medical, product design, exhibition and education services, according to the plan.

Financial regulations

The standing committee of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress passed a set of new rules to regulate and supervise the city’s local financial activities in a meeting held last Friday.

The new rules, which will come into force on July 1, are aimed at regulating financial organizations and their activities, protecting the legitimate rights and interests of financial consumers and investors, preventing and resolving financial risks and building Shanghai into an international financial center. 

The new rules include six chapters and 43 articles, which are the “Basic Law” for the Shanghai government to implement its financial supervision. The legal responsibilities of different financial activities are clearly stated. 

Hainan Free Trade Port

The construction of 100 projects at the Hainan Free Trade Port started Monday with a total investment of 48.9 billion yuan (US$7 billion), the Hainan Daily reported.

The projects will focus on areas including industrial development, 5G network infrastructure and the enhancement of public services.

Fifty 5G network infrastructure projects will cost 29.7 billion yuan, 61% of the total investment. Thirty industrial development projects will cost 15.5 billion yuan, or 32% of the total investment, while the remaining 20 public service projects will cost 3.7 billion yuan, or 7% of the total investment.

Guangdong province

From April 11, about 87.3% of workers in Guangdong province had returned to work as the Covid-19 outbreak eased. About 98.7% of companies had resumed production and operations in the southern China province. 

All wholesale and retail companies have basically resumed operations, while most migrant workers had returned to work. The food supply had remained sufficient, so far, said the Guangdong provincial government. 

Company news

SAIC Motor Corp, a Shanghai-based automobile maker, recorded a 58.5% drop in sales to 231,500 units in March, compared with 558,600 units in the same period last year. In the first quarter, the company’s sales decreased 55.7% to 679,028 units from a year ago.

Its three joint ventures – SAIC Volkswagen, SAIC-GM and Shanghai General Motors Wuling – all witnessed falling sales, down 60.89%, 58.03% and 61.53%, respectively.

During the first quarter, auto production and sales in China stood at 3.47 million units and 3.67 million units, down 45.2% and 42.4% year on year, respectively, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

China Railway Engineering Equipment Group (CREG), a unit of China Railway Engineering Corp, said it had produced the world’s largest rectangular shield tunneling machine.

The shield tunneling machine, which rolled off the production line Friday at the corporation’s Shanghai plant, is 14.82 meters in width and 9.446 meters in height. It will be used to carry out tunneling in an expressway project in the city of Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province.

It marks a breakthrough for China in technology to design and manufacture shield tunneling machinery through solving a series of technical roadblocks in the process of design and manufacturing.

Huaxia Bank, a mid-sized lender in China, has gained approval from the People’s Bank of China to issue up to 10 billion yuan of green bonds to fund environmentally friendly projects.

The bonds will be traded in China’s interbank bond market, Huaxia Bank said in a statement on Sunday.

Source: https://asiatimes.com/