Deyang · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Deyang is a heavy-equipment city built up by Third Front construction; before that it had almost no modern industry. In September 1958 construction broke ground on the Deyang Hydraulic Power Generation Equipment Plant; on October 13 the Deyang Industrial Zone held the groundbreaking ceremony for the Southwest Heavy Machinery Plant (later renamed the Second Heavy Machinery Plant) and the Deyang Hydraulic Power Generation Equipment Plant (later renamed the Dongfang Electric Machinery Plant). The Second Heavy Machinery Plant was one of the 156 key projects of the early PRC; its Phase I project had 18 extra-large production workshops and a designed annual output of 120,000 tons of heavy machinery products. From May 1961, Erzhong and Dongdian were successively put on slowed construction; in August 1964 the State Council issued the "Notice on the Construction of the Deyang Heavy Machinery Plant", marking the resumption; in January 1965 Erzhong and Dongdian were listed among the Third Front "battle of annihilation" projects; and in May the same year the First Ministry of Machine Building decided to site the Dongfang Turbine Plant in Hanwang town, Mianzhu. Dongdian was completed and put into operation at the end of 1966, Erzhong went into full production in January 1971, and the Dongfang Turbine Plant was completed and started production on November 25, 1974. Between 1964 and 1978 the state invested 1 billion yuan in Deyang, one-twentieth of the national total, building a heavy industry base on par with Harbin and Shanghai. Besides the "three big plants", companion enterprises such as the Deyang Refractory Materials Plant and the Sichuan Construction Machinery Plant were built in the same period, along with the industrial zone's cogeneration plant and dedicated railway lines, forming a complete heavy-machinery production and cooperation network; Erzhong's Phase I project was designed for an annual output of 120,000 tons of heavy machinery products, with 18 extra-large production workshops.

In 2025, Deyang's GDP reached 338.71 billion yuan, up 5.4%; total industrial output value stepped onto the 500-billion-yuan mark, above-scale industrial value added grew 5% (9.7% in the first three quarters), and technical-upgrade investment grew 21.6%. Above-scale industrial enterprises reached 1,567, with 307 national- and provincial-level specialized and innovative SMEs. The "3+1" leading industries — machinery equipment, materials and chemicals, food and beverages, and the digital economy — account for over 90% of the city's industry; in the first three quarters their value added grew 10.1%, with machinery equipment up 11.5%, materials and chemicals 12.1%, food and beverages 5.0% and the digital economy 22.3%; above-scale high-tech manufacturing value added grew 17.0%. Deyang is China's major technical equipment manufacturing base: 70% of the country's gas-fired power units, 60% of nuclear power units, 50% of large power-station castings and forgings, 40% of hydropower units and 30% of thermal power units are made in Deyang, and its annual output of power generation equipment has ranked first in the world for 20 consecutive years. Leading enterprises include Sinomach Heavy Equipment, Dongfang Electric Machinery, Dongfang Turbine, Dongfang Wind Power, Dongfang Boiler and Jiannanchun. The Deyang ETDZ's 2025 above-scale industrial output value was 112.54 billion yuan, with 111 equipment manufacturing enterprises clustered. In 2025 Deyang was selected both as a national pilot city for new-type manufacturing technical upgrading and as a national pilot city for SME digital transformation; with the two national pilots combined, technical-upgrade investment grew 21.6%. Beyond heavy equipment, tobacco processing at the Shifang Cigarette Plant and baijiu brewing at Jiannanchun are the other two directions where Deyang concentrates automation-retrofit investment.

Deyang's automation is concentrated in the heavy, high-temperature and high-precision processes of clean-energy equipment. Dongfang Electric Machinery built the large power-generation equipment industry's first green "unmanned workshop" for stator laminations, raising capacity from over 9,000 tons to 15,000 tons and lifting per-capita lamination output more than 6-fold. In July 2024 Dongfang Turbine completed China's first gas-turbine smart manufacturing base: blade processing shrank from 3 days of manual grinding to 6 hours on a digitalized production line; digitalized assembly in the general assembly shop of Heavy Machining Branch No. 1 cut the assembly cycle of the country's largest thermal power unit cluster by 40%; and the blade "lights-out line" runs at 0.03-mm machining precision with a 99% pass rate, lifting per-capita efficiency by 650%. At the broader level: in 2025 Deyang was designated a national pilot city for SME digital transformation, 583 enterprises accelerated smart upgrading and digital transformation, 5 enterprises were selected as national 5G factories, and digital-economy core industry revenue reached 48 billion yuan, up 8%. In food and beverages, Jiannanchun was selected as a typical case of MIIT's 2024 "digital three products" application scenarios. In agriculture, Deyang is a major grain-and-oil producing area of the province, ranking first provincewide in per-unit yields of both wheat and rapeseed, but publicly available local quantitative data on agricultural machinery and processing automation are limited (to be verified). On equipment selection, Deyang's heavy-equipment sector relies mainly on heavy-duty six-axis robots, robot machine tending and machine vision: in Dongfang Turbine's unmanned workshop, gas-turbine blades go through more than 50 processes with over 100 parameters monitored in real time, cutting line staff from 40 to 8 with 90% equipment utilization; and the 2D/3D vision bolt-tightening robot developed by Dongfang Shuke achieves a 100% nut-recognition rate and lifts overall efficiency by more than 50%.