5G, industrial internet back manufacturing

Cutting-edge solutions fresh impetus for traditional enterprises like Ansteel

The industrial internet has been providing a strong driving force for the high-quality development of China's manufacturing.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the industrial internet has already been applied to 45 major categories of the national economy and the scale of the industrial internet industry in the country has exceeded 1 trillion yuan ($148.3 billion).

The country currently has more than 3,100 "5G+Industrial Internet" projects and 700 projects were established during the second quarter of the year.

To accelerate the upgrade of traditional industries and boost production efficiency, many manufacturing enterprises have been leveraging emerging digital technologies. In this context, Ansteel Group, a Liaoning province-based centrally administered State-owned enterprise, stands out.

In 2021, the enterprise put forward a plan to construct "Digital Ansteel", revolving around automation, informatization, digitalization and intelligence.

Using the industrial internet, two projects－Qidashan Iron Smart Mining Project and Guanbaoshan Smart Plant Project－were launched by Ansteel Mining Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Ansteel, and have yielded fresh results.

"Based on the industrial internet platform, we've reshaped our production process and management model," said Huang Guicheng, manager of Ansteel Group Guanbaoshan Mining Co, at the main forum of the Fourth Global Industrial Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on July 28.

According to Huang, it helps to make scientific production plans, simplify the original four-step dispatching system to two steps, ensure safe industrial production, improve efficiency, and reduce costs and energy consumption.

"Ansteel is a front-runner in the smart manufacturing of China's mining industry and we also plan to share the projects with our peers," added Chen Hongbin, associate dean of Ansteel Mining Design Institute.

Ansteel's industrial internet platform was announced as one of the best practices of a promotion campaign, titled "Innovative Applications of Industrial Internet", at the Fourth Global Industrial Internet Conference.

The campaign was initiated by the China Federation of Industrial Economics and 10 national industry associations in 2021.Nearly 1,000 practices of industrial internet in traditional industries were collected this year and 12 of them were recognized as best practices.

The "Feng" platform of Xinfengming Group, a chemical fiber manufacturer in Zhejiang province, was also on the list.

The platform, integrating industrial internet and 5G technology, was built by Xinfengming and China Mobile. Due to the platform, the company increased its chemical fiber production capacity from 2.7 million metric tons to 6.8 million tons.

"The industrial internet is also an important engine of growth for the digital economy in Zhejiang," stressed Wu Junqing, deputy head of the Economy and Information Technology Department of Zhejiang when addressing the conference.

According to Wu, Zhejiang, whose industrial digitalization index has ranked first in the country for three consecutive years, has been building the "1+N" (1 representing a top-level industrial internet platform and N for industrial internet platforms for different sectors) industrial internet platform system in recent years, and is now home to 285 provincial-level industrial internet platforms serving more than 110,000 industrial enterprises.

Despite the fast development of the industrial internet in China, Li Yizhong, head of the China Federation of Industrial Economics, noted in his keynote speech that more efforts are still needed to promote industrial digitalization in depth.