Dadukou District · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Dadukou exists as a district because of steel. In 1937, with the War of Resistance at a crisis point, the Steel Works Relocation Committee was formed to preserve the nation's industrial lifeline; within 40 days, tens of thousands of tons of equipment and materials from the Hanyang Iron Works, the Shanghai Steel Works, the Liuhegou Iron Works, and others were transshipped from Yichang, Hubei, to Dadukou. Production began in 1939. The works had 8 manufacturing shops, 6 transport wharves, and about 258 own vessels; at its peak it employed 15,699 people, and its steel accounted for 90% of the total output of China's rear areas — it never shut down for a single day under more than six years of continuous Japanese bombing. The museum's prized exhibit is an 8,000-horsepower twin-cylinder horizontal steam prime mover built in Sheffield, England, in 1905 and weighing 250 tons; it was moved west to this site in 1938, and in 1952 it drove a rolling mill that produced New China's first "Chinese-style" 38-kg heavy rail, making the Chengdu–Chongqing Railway "made in China" from rails down to bolts. In 1955 Chongqing Iron and Steel built a section steel plant here; the industry once spoke of "Angang in the north, Chonggang in the south." In 1965 Dadukou was formally established as a district on account of Chonggang. The district also hosted the Chongqing Asbestos Plant (founded in 1940; the largest comprehensive asbestos products plant in southwest China) and the Chongqing Heavy Casting and Forging Plant (Changzheng Plant). In 2011, when the section steel plant's 2,700-mm plate mill rolled its last plate, the old Chonggang steel production lines were shut down in full; in September 2019 the Chongqing Industrial Museum, built on the section steel plant's industrial remains, opened.

After Chongqing Steel's environmental relocation, Dadukou moved from industrial "hollowing-out" to reconstruction. In 2024, districtwide industrial value added was 14.208 billion yuan, up 4.4%; above-scale industrial value added grew 5.2%; gross above-scale industrial output was 33.53 billion yuan, up 5.0%. Industrial enterprises passed 900, including 93 above-scale industrial enterprises (9 added during the year). By sector, big-data and intelligent industry output grew 17.3%, pulling overall output growth up by 6.0 percentage points — the only significantly positive driver; eco-environmental protection fell 9.9%, big health and biomedicine 19.2%, and new materials 2.9%, while the xiaomian (noodle) industry grew 2.7%. By industry, computer, communications and other electronic equipment manufacturing grew 17.8%; railway, shipbuilding, aerospace and other transport equipment manufacturing grew 26.9%; special-purpose equipment manufacturing fell 10.7%; and non-metallic mineral products fell 10.6%. During the year, districtwide output of intelligent security equipment exceeded 103 million units (sets); medical device output accounted for about 35% of the city's total; high-end motorcycle complete-vehicle capacity exceeded 100,000 units with output growth above 20%; and the Chongqing xiaomian industry cultivated 4 municipal-level "hit products" with revenue growth near 20%. Within above-scale industry, high-tech output accounted for 42.5% and strategic emerging industries for 57.6%; industrial investment grew 18% in January–October.

Dadukou has published neither its industrial robot stock, nor annual new installations, nor robot density; all three are to be verified. What can be verified is progress: as of early 2025 the district had built 3 smart factories and 15 digital workshops, and 8 enterprises had passed the national standards certification for integration of informatization and industrialization; in 2024 it implemented 21 industrial technical upgrading projects, with investment up 44.9% year on year, and above-scale strategic emerging manufacturing output grew 5.6%. On municipal lists, Chongqing International Composite Materials Co., Ltd.'s "digital management of fiberglass smart factory production and operations" was selected as a 2024 Chongqing industrial internet new-model demonstration project, and Chongqing Taicang Technology's "digital workshop for high-end motorcycle cylinder block manufacturing" was named a 2024 municipal-level digital workshop. Inferring from the industrial structure, automation equipment falls mainly into three process groups: SMT placement, dispensing, and functional testing in electronics manufacturing and intelligent security equipment assembly; filling, labeling, and packaging for in-vitro diagnostic reagents and medical devices; and welding and machine-tool loading/unloading for motorcycle components. The corresponding machine types are mainly SCARA robots, small six-axis robots, parallel sorting robots, and machine vision; heavy-load and large six-axis applications are rare. In the food segment (Chongqing xiaomian), automation centers on automatic packaging and palletizing.