Suining · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Suining’s industrialization started late. During the First and Second Five-Year Plans, not a single major national construction project landed in the city; only a few industrial enterprises were newly built, such as the municipal cotton spinning mill, the silk reeling plant and the Penglai Salt Factory. After the Suining Prefecture was abolished in 1958, Mianyang Region designated the southern counties to focus on agriculture, and Suining’s industry went into reverse: by 1965 only 405 industrial enterprises remained citywide, 23.3% fewer than in 1957. During the Third Front construction period, Sichuan received more investment than any other province, but owing to its resource endowment and other factors Suining won not a single Third Front project, missing the first wave of industrialization. In the same period, the PLA General Logistics Department’s northern Sichuan production base was still laid out within Shehong: Plant 3533 (northern Sichuan printing and dyeing plant), Plant 3536 (northern Sichuan garment plant, preparation began October 1966) and Plant 3537 (northern Sichuan rubber plant), supported by a national cotton strategic reserve warehouse, the Dongfeng power station and a cotton spinning mill; Plant 3536 relocated to Mianyang in the mid-1990s. The Suining Cotton Textile Mill broke ground in September 1958 and began trial production in April 1960; by 1985 it had reached a capacity of 35,000 spindles and 1,008 looms. In addition, the Longfeng Hydropower Station was sited and built starting in 1957, and in 1983 a United Nations African energy inspection team visited Suining to study its small hydropower. At the end of 1978, the city’s total industrial output value was only 326 million yuan.

In 2025, Suining’s GDP reached 200.214 billion yuan, up 7.1%; above-scale industrial value added grew 11.1%, industrial tax revenue accounted for nearly 40% of the city’s total tax revenue, and industry contributed 47.1% to GDP growth. Within the “5+1+N” modern industrial system, value added of the five leading industries grew 11.8%: lithium batteries and new energy up 14.6%, electronic information 14.1%, oil, gas and chemicals 12.7%, food and beverage 8.1%, and equipment manufacturing 3.7%. Lithium batteries are the flagship industry: more than 50 above-scale enterprises have been cultivated, forming a full life-cycle industry chain from lithium resource development to end-use applications and recycling. In 2025 the city produced 73,200 tons of basic lithium salts, 563,000 tons of lithium iron phosphate and over 11.64 GWh of power lithium batteries; its lithium carbonate delivery warehouse handled 13% of national delivery business. In oil, gas and chemicals, 10.77 billion cubic meters of natural gas were extracted over the year, and gasoline and diesel output grew 124% and 41.2% year on year respectively. Above-scale industrial enterprises reached 668, with operating revenue of 153.99 billion yuan, up 6.6%. Growth rates of industrial investment and technological transformation investment leapt to fifth and eighth in the province respectively.

Suining’s automation demand comes mainly from lithium batteries, automobiles and electronic information. On the lithium side, Sichuan Xiangyuan’s cylindrical lithium battery project, with a total investment of 6 billion yuan, went from signing to factory topping-out in just five months. On the automotive side, the production workshop of Sichuan JAC Motors Co., Ltd. completes cab welding with fully automated welding equipment; in equipment manufacturing, 30 enterprises joined the Chengdu–Chongqing equipment supply chain collaboration platform, raising the local matching rate to 35.6%. In logistics and parks, the Western Cloud Warehouse smart distribution base in the Suining high-tech zone (total investment over 400 million yuan) operates as a “lights-out warehouse” with fully unmanned processes based on AI recognition, unmanned forklifts and smart scheduling, and is expected to cut logistics costs by 25% and improve efficiency by 40%; a locally developed drone inspection control system has been put into use, covering a 5-square-kilometer area in 20 minutes — eight times the efficiency of manual inspection. Citywide, 200 smart upgrading and digital transformation projects have been implemented, 200 above-scale enterprises have been pushed through digital transformation, and provincial-level smart factory and 5G factory benchmarks have been cultivated. No authoritative statistics on Suining’s industrial robot stock, annual new installations or robot density could be found through public channels (to be verified).