Potential of industrial internet industry surpasses manufacturers' upgrades

Thanks to its achievements in the industrial internet industry, Qingdao, an eastern coastal city in Shandong province, is poised to boost the high-quality development of the Yellow River basin. The development will come by helping local industries with digital transformation and upgrading.

Giving full play to its regional and industrial advantages, Shandong province held the 2020 Qingdao Land-Sea Linkage Summit on Aug 8. It aimed to deepen openness and coordination between the Yellow River basin and its Jiaodong Economic Circle and inject momentum into China's domestic economic growth.

The industrial internet, as one of Qingdao's most competitive industries, is believed by insiders to have the capability of promoting the high-quality development of the Yellow River basin thanks to its series of digital solutions.

The industrial internet gathers all kinds of enterprises on one online platform and enables them to collaborate and interact. Topics of potential collaboration include human resources, capital, technology and market trends.

COSMOPlat, an industrial internet platform developed by household appliance manufacturer Haier, is the backbone of Qingdao's efforts to build a global industrial internet hub.

With 340 million users, COSMOPlat has developed into one of the top three industrial internet platforms in the world, alongside similar platforms developed by General Electric of the United States and Siemens of Germany, according to officials in Qingdao.

COSMOPlat ranked first among China's cross-industry and cross-sector industrial internet platforms in 2019, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

At the 2020 Qingdao Land-Sea Linkage Summit, COSMOPlat displayed targeted creative solutions to help promote concerted cooperation among the cities along the Yellow River and the five member cities of the Jiaodong Economic Circle, namely Qingdao, Weihai, Weihang, Rizhao and Yantai.

Taking full advantage of COSMOPlat, Qingdao will share its industrial data resources and application scenarios with the cities in the Yellow River basin, to help the cities' companies transform and upgrade while improving production efficiency and product competitiveness, local officials said.

The industrial internet will not only help shore up companies and cities, but also help cities complement each other and realize sound resource allocation, local officials said.

COSMOPlat is assisting 387 companies in seven provinces in the Yellow River basin by improving production capability and efficiency while also cutting costs.

In Houma, Shanxi province, COSMOPlat launched a medical supplies production solution in just 48 hours to allow the province's first automatic medical mask production line to produce 100,000 masks a day. The mask producer can have a gross profit rate of 50 percent.

In Xi'an, capital city of Shaanxi province, COSMOPlat empowered a clothing manufacturer with advanced intelligent manufacturing technologies, which helps the manufacturer achieve an annual production capability of 60,000 sets of customized products.

After the intelligent upgrading, the clothing manufacturer improved its production efficiency by 28 percent, shortened its delivery period from 45 days to seven working days and cut an annual average cost of 1.8 million yuan ($259,000).

The COSMOPlat established a regional industrial internet platform in Longnan, Gansu province, which helps build intelligent factories, digital workshops and automatic production lines in the city.

Empowering local agriculture, tourism and medicinal material industries with digital solutions, the platform helped offer 1,200 new jobs to local residents and helped local companies improve their popularity and competitiveness.

"Looking ahead, the industrial internet can help boost the economic development of the Yellow River basin from multiple perspectives, including the cultivation and strengthening of emerging industries, the transforming and upgrading of traditional industries and the acceleration of modern service industry development," said Zhou Yunjie, chairman of Haier.