Panzhihua · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Before 1964, Panzhihua was still a sparsely populated expanse of high mountains. On March 20, 1965, the Panzhihua Construction Command and the Panzhihua Special District People’s Committee were established; on April 22 the city was renamed Dukou City of Sichuan Province, and in January 1987, with State Council approval, it was renamed Panzhihua City. Pangang (Panzhihua Iron and Steel) began construction in 1965 (Phase 1); site leveling of the main plant area started at the end of 1967, civil works followed in 1968 and equipment installation in 1969; blast furnace No. 1 tapped its first iron on July 1, 1970, steel output began in 1971 and steel products in 1974. On August 16 of the same year, the rail and beam plant with an annual rolling capacity of 1.1 million tons was put into operation, marking the basic completion of Phase 1 and forming a comprehensive steel production capacity of 1.5 million tons at an investment of 1.48 billion yuan. Supporting facilities included the Dukou Cement Plant (completed December 1966, annual capacity 280,000 tons), the Jinsha Cement Plant (completed December 1965), the Dukou and Hemenkou thermal power plants, and later the Ertan Hydropower Station (total installed capacity 3.3 million kilowatts). Pangang’s Phase 2 began in 1986 and was basically completed in 1997, ending the history of western China’s inability to produce plate; in May 2010 it was restructured with Ansteel. Proven reserves of vanadium-titanium magnetite in the Panxi region total 9.85 billion tons. “Panzhihua Iron and Steel Plant” was selected for the third batch of national industrial heritage sites in December 2019.

In 2025, Panzhihua’s GDP reached 140.957 billion yuan, up 3.2%; above-scale industrial value added fell 5.0%, the product sales rate of industrial enterprises was 94.0%, the industrialization rate was 47.9%, and manufacturing value added accounted for 26.7% of GDP — 5.4 percentage points above the provincial average and sixth in the province. Only 12 of 34 major industry categories posted value-added growth: non-ferrous metal mining and dressing (mainly vanadium-titanium concentrates) grew 2.9% and accounted for over 20% of above-scale industry, firmly ranking first among all sectors; metal products grew 20.6%, comprehensive utilization of waste resources 18.2%, chemical raw materials and chemical products manufacturing 15.3%, and coal mining and washing 14.1%; ferrous metal mining and dressing and ferrous metal smelting and rolling both recorded double-digit declines. Output value of the full advanced-materials industry chain exceeded 100 billion yuan, and the city was selected as a main provincial host of the advanced-materials industry chain. The world’s first commercial hydrogen production project via photocatalytic water splitting and the nation’s first full-chain liquid hydrogen “production, storage, refueling and use” demonstration project were completed and put into operation, and the province’s first all-vanadium redox flow battery storage station was connected to the grid. Above-scale industrial enterprises achieved operating revenue of 178.19 billion yuan (sixth in the province) and total profits of 16.97 billion yuan (fifth in the province); industrial investment grew 8.2%, with 21 new above-scale industrial enterprises added.

Automation in Panzhihua centers on the digital retrofit of mining and metallurgical processes. In 2025, under the smart upgrading and digital transformation drive, diagnostic assessments were completed for more than 360 enterprises and smart manufacturing maturity assessments for 123; Pangang Steel Vanadium and Pangang Mining were rated provincial-level advanced smart factories; Pangang Mining’s “5G + smart mine” project was selected for the MIIT’s 2025 5G Factory list; and Steel City Group’s “10-gigabit factory pilot” became one of the first batch of MIIT 10-gigabit optical network pilot projects nationwide. On key projects, a “list-based” push targeted 51 key projects with a total investment of 72.47 billion yuan, and 14 projects were completed, including Merilin’s high-end vanadium-titanium wear-resistant materials project. On hydrogen, the “Sichuan Panxi Energy-Sector Hydrogen Regional Pilot” was selected for the first national pilot list. Judging from public reports, local robot applications are concentrated in unmanned driving and remote operation at open-pit mines, smelting casting and sampling, grinding of vanadium-titanium wear-resistant material castings, and packaging and palletizing of vanadium products — high-temperature, high-risk and heavy-labor stages. No authoritative statistics on Panzhihua’s industrial robot stock, annual new installations or robot density could be found through public channels (to be verified).