Yibin · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Yibin’s industry began with wartime relocation during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression: the Zhongyuan Paper Mill, the Tianyuan Electrochemical Works and others moved from eastern China to Yibin and resumed production. Tianyuan Group was founded in 1944, when Wu Yunchu shipped the electrolytic cells of the Shanghai Tianyuan Chemical Works through the bombing blockade via Chongqing to Yibin. In brewing, in the early years after liberation eight distillery workshops in Yibin city — including Changfasheng and Lichuanyong — jointly formed a daqu cooperative, which was reorganized in 1952 into the state-owned No. 24 Liquor Factory; that year it produced 3.8 tons of qu liquor, including 2.6 tons of Wuliangye, and in March 1959 it was renamed the “Local State-Owned Wuliangye Distillery”. Third Front construction began in 1964 and made Yibin a key Third Front area in Sichuan: between 1964 and 1968 the state placed 49 key construction projects in Yibin Prefecture, 17 of them military-industrial, covering machinery, electronics, chlor-alkali chemicals, papermaking and other fields; CNNC Jianzhong, Sanjiang Machinery and Jinchuan Electronics became representatives of Yibin industry. In the early reform period, “five small” enterprises in small-scale fertilizer, agricultural machinery, steel, light textiles and building materials were scattered across the countryside; by the early 21st century a “one black, one white” dual-engine economy based on baijiu and coal had taken shape. In October 2016 the city’s Fifth Party Congress proposed the “dual-wheel drive for industrial development” strategy, beginning the switch toward emerging industries such as power batteries, smart terminals, automobiles and high-end equipment. The Third Front-era CNNC Jianzhong, Sanjiang Machinery and Jinchuan Electronics correspond to nuclear fuel elements, marine machinery and electronic components respectively, and together with chlor-alkali chemicals and papermaking they form the industrial skeleton of Yibin.

In 2025, Yibin’s GDP reached 413.473 billion yuan, up 5.5%, ranking third in the province; above-scale industrial value added grew 7.7%, with a product sales rate of 97.2%. Within the “4+4+4” industrial framework, industrial value added grew 7.8%, of which crystalline silicon photovoltaics rose 24.9%, power batteries 24.1%, and intelligent connected new-energy vehicles 20.3%; above-scale high-tech manufacturing value added grew 14.5%, 6.8 percentage points above the above-scale industrial average. Scale of the four leading industries: premium baijiu operating revenue of about 204 billion yuan (up 1.5%); power batteries about 125 billion yuan (up 18.1%, with cell output around one-tenth of the global total); crystalline silicon photovoltaics about 37 billion yuan (first in the province); and the digital economy 63 billion yuan. In 2025, high-tech manufacturing accounted for 37.0% of above-scale industrial output citywide, 25 percentage points higher than at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan. The PV industry has signed 35 projects with a total investment of 135.3 billion yuan; the smart terminal industrial park has gathered more than 200 upstream and downstream enterprises, and projector output accounts for over 20% of the national total. The main carrier is the Yibin Sanjiang New Area, with the Linkou ETDZ, the Jiang’an Yangchun Industrial Park and others hosting power battery and PV projects; anchored by Sichuan CATL, Yibin has attracted more than 120 upstream and downstream power battery projects with agreed investment exceeding 200 billion yuan, forming a closed loop from basic raw materials to battery cells, new-energy vehicles and battery recycling.

Automation retrofits in Yibin cover baijiu, power batteries, photovoltaics and hog slaughter. Citywide in 2025, 580 enterprises reached Level L2 or above in the provincial smart upgrading and digital transformation assessment, the digital transformation coverage rate was 72%, and seven enterprises including Yashide and Xiangcheng Intelligent were rated advanced-level smart factories; one national-level excellent smart factory platform was created (Wuliangye’s full-industry-chain digitally integrated smart baijiu factory) along with three provincial-level digital transformation promotion centers. In baijiu, Plus Packaging Materials Co., Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Wuliangye, has automated the entire process from raw material feeding, production and processing, quality inspection and logistics transfer to warehousing; in Smart Brewing Workshop No. 2 of Nanxi Liquor Industry, more than 2,000 stainless-steel capped fermentation pits are lined up in neat rows, with industrial robots and unmanned cranes replacing traditional steps such as barefoot treading of qu and turning of cooling mats; Heguangtongcheng was rated the country’s first “lights-out factory”. Hog slaughter is the most typical case on the agricultural side: Yibin Dekang Food’s project in the Nanxi ETDZ for slaughtering and deep-processing 3 million hogs a year is equipped with CO2 stunning equipment, pulse-type automatic singeing machines and automatic grading robotic arms, able to slaughter 450 hogs an hour — more than twice the efficiency of traditional methods — with a supporting cold-chain project invested at 148 million yuan. By equipment: power battery lines rely mainly on winding machines, stacking machines, automated module PACK lines, AGVs and machine vision inspection; Sichuan CATL is the world’s second lithium battery “Lighthouse Factory”, with an automation rate of 95% and a domestic-sourcing rate of 97%; its fourth-generation line produces one cell per second, and the coating stage uses closed-loop control algorithms to model more than 1,000 powder and fluid parameters, with a single-cell failure rate at the PPB level.