Development of new quality productive forces drives industrial growth

NANCHANG, April 9 (Xinhua) -- In a knitting company in east China's Jiangxi Province, a giant screen has demonstrated order conditions, daily output, and energy-dissipating conditions.

Gao Wengen, manager of Jiangxi Huayuan Knitting Co., Ltd., said the upgraded digital production project with a total investment of over 10 million yuan (about 1.4 million U.S. dollars) has greatly avoided production waste resulting from the extensive production mode in the past.

To make 1 kg of samples, the company previously had to produce at least 200 kg of products with the machine running, but now, the upgrade has enabled the precise control of machines, which can produce any amount of samples as needed.

"Now, we can produce 2 grams of cloth at the same unit cost as producing 2 tonnes," Gao said.

In a move to map out the development of strategic emerging industries and future industries, China has recently made developing new quality productive forces a catchphrase in its policymaking.

By underscoring this concept, China aims to foster advanced productivity through revolutionary technology breakthroughs, innovative allocation of production factors, and deepened industrial upgrading.

In Jiangxi, where traditional industries take up 70 percent of the province's industrial structure, the provincial authorities issued a manufacturing digital transformation action plan, striving to realize the digital transformation of more than 10,000 enterprises in about two years.

A leading company in China's copper industry, Jiangxi Copper Co., Ltd. (Jiangxi Copper) has promoted the transformation and upgrading of the entire mining process, including beneficiation and smelting, adopting "smart mine" and 5G mining in more and more projects in recent years.

Wu Jun, head of Guixi Smelter affiliated with Jiangxi Copper, said in the past, 12 independent processes, such as transportation, sampling, and weighing, did not connect with each other.

Now, a digital workshop has linked all the processes together, reducing the overall energy consumption of the whole plant by more than 7 percent, said Wu.

Benefiting from the digital transformation, the energy consumption volume of the high energy-consuming industries in the manufacturing sector in Jiangxi has decreased by 9 percentage points over the past two years compared with the early period of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) and the province's value-added industrial output of enterprises above the designated size increased by 5.4 percent year-on-year in 2023.

Enterprises above the designated size refer to those with an annual main business revenue of 20 million yuan or more.