Zhong County · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Zhong County lies in the heartland of the Three Gorges Reservoir region. In the late-1990s relocation and restructuring of reservoir-area industrial and mining enterprises, many older local enterprises were shut down, liquidated or reorganized; restructured enterprises such as the Zhong County Water Turbine Plant became for a time among the county's few growth points, while in pharmaceuticals enterprises like Tiandi Pharmaceutical preserved a small base. The real industrial breakthrough came with the 2008 introduction of Conch Cement: in April that year, Zhong County brought in Anhui Conch Group to invest in a new dry-process cement project; on June 8, an investment agreement was formally signed with the county government for a 10-million-ton-per-year new dry-process cement project; on July 2, Chongqing Conch Cement Co., Ltd. was registered. Ground was broken on the first production line on December 22, 2008; the clinker line was ignited on June 29, 2010, charged on July 3, and the first cement mill went into operation on August 4 — Chongqing's first new dry-process cement line with annual capacity in the tens of millions of tons. The second line broke ground in December 2009 and was ignited on April 6, 2011. In 2012, Chongqing Conch delivered gross industrial output value above 900 million yuan and paid nearly 40 million yuan in taxes — then Zhong County's largest-investment, highest-return, biggest-employment industrial project. Afterwards, Zhong County Industrial Park was laid out as "one city, six parks" under "one zone, multiple parks," gradually forming four clusters — equipment manufacturing, agricultural byproduct processing, energy/chemicals/pharmaceuticals, and new building materials — and bringing in Terui New Energy, Tianhui Energy and others to build a lithium battery new materials chain; Zhongrun Energy became southwest China's largest LNG processing base.

In 2024, Zhong County's GDP grew 6.7% — sixth fastest in the city and second in northeastern Chongqing — with a three-sector structure of 10.5:41.8:47.7. Industrial value added was 14.529 billion yuan, up 6.2%, with above-scale industrial value added up 6.3%. By major sector: mining grew 60.3%, manufacturing 4.6%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply 23.2%. Output values of the "2+4" modern manufacturing clusters: chemical drugs 5.004 billion yuan (-2.1%), new energy materials 4.024 billion yuan (+2.9%), intelligent manufacturing equipment 3.671 billion yuan (+10.6%), prefabricated building components 2.9 billion yuan (-11.4%), grain and oil processing 1.2 billion yuan (-10.5%), and fruit and vegetable processing 919 million yuan (+20.6%). By industry: food manufacturing grew 7.5%, general equipment manufacturing 7.4%, computer, communications and other electronic equipment manufacturing 5.3%, and gas production and supply 54.8%. Above-scale industrial enterprises' operating revenue reached 22.546 billion yuan, up 15.9%, and total profits 1.503 billion yuan, up 21.2%. Zhong County Industrial Park delivered gross industrial output value of 34.68 billion yuan in 2024, up 19.3%, hosting 156 enterprises including 73 above-scale industrial enterprises. On the agricultural side, citrus is the core resource: fruit output in 2024 was 582,900 tons, up 8.9%. The lithium battery new materials cluster has been upgraded to "national level."

Zhong County's automation applications are most concentrated in citrus post-harvest processing, followed by cement and lithium battery materials. In citrus, the Three Gorges Citrus Zhong County fresh fruit distribution and processing base went into operation on December 28, 2023, equipped with 1 flexible citrus sorting line (50 tons/day, for thin-skinned varieties such as Ehime and Chunjian) and 1 orange sorting line (200 tons/day), plus 2 fully automatic packaging lines. It handles automated feeding, washing, sterilization, preservation, three-dimensional grading (weight, sugar content, color), automatic boxing, packaging and palletizing; apart from the central control room and raw-material loading and unloading, the whole process is essentially automated, with a CNC-ization rate of key processes at 100%. The equipment uses machine vision and spectral analysis to test more than 20 indicators — sugar content, weight, fruit diameter, moldy core, dry-flesh rate, defect rate and more — sorting into up to 16 grades at 10 fruits per second with grading accuracy above 98%; on site, robotic arms pick up and transfer citrus crates. The Chongqing (Zhong County) Modern Agriculture Citrus Industrial Park, with total investment above 2 billion yuan, includes Asia's largest single-site smart citrus sorting workshop. The county has also built the "Zhong County Zhongcheng Industry Brain" (1+4+5+N architecture), providing precision orchard mapping and AI-based farming recommendations for 365,000 mu of citrus. In cement, Chongqing Conch has invested 6 billion yuan in 6 projects including a smart factory; inside the smart control building, robots test sample quality in real time around the clock. There is no publicly available authoritative figure for Zhong County's installed industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (units per 10,000 industrial workers) — all three to be verified.