Baoshan · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Baoshan’s industrial base has two strands: one is textile production spanning several centuries, the other is the locally run state-owned plants built from the 1950s onward around sugar, tea, coffee and mining and metallurgy. In textiles, by the late Western Han Baoshan was already exporting silk, brocade, gauze and luore silk fabrics via the Southern Silk Road; in the late Qing and early Republic period, mechanized products such as native cloth, wide cloth and towels appeared along with weaving factories and industrial institutes as scaled production entities; after the founding of the People’s Republic, the Baoshan Prefecture Knitwear Factory and the Baoshan Silk Factory were established in succession; in the early years of this century, Ligen Silk took over under the “eastern mulberry moving west” program, and more recently Boxiang Technology and Hengfeng Textiles have arrived. In agricultural product processing, in 1952 the Tropical Crops Institute of the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences introduced coffee to Lujiangba for trial planting; it succeeded in 1956, and by 1960 the planted area was nearly 10,000 mu; in 1979 the institute developed China’s first coffee cherry pulping machine, after which primary coffee processing became mechanized. From 1978 to 1985 the city built seven new mechanized white sugar mills and five refined tea factories, plus one tin plant, one chemical fertilizer plant, one cement plant and a batch of small hydropower stations; by 1990 a pattern had formed dominated by sugar and covering more than 30 categories and over 60 products, including tea, electric power, mining and metallurgy, food, machinery, tobacco, textiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and building materials. In 1999 the provincial government approved the establishment of the Tengchong Economic Development Zone, the city’s first industrial park. After 2016, Xi’an LONGi, Yunnan Tongwei and others set up operations, making Baoshan one of the few prefectures in Yunnan with a front-end chain of industrial silicon – polysilicon – monocrystalline silicon.

In 2024, Baoshan’s GDP reached 128.19 billion yuan, up 2.6%; value added of the secondary industry was 41.339 billion yuan, down 0.1%, of which industrial value added was 24.519 billion yuan, down 1.9%. Above-scale industrial value added fell 3.7% for the year. By category, mining grew 11.7%, manufacturing fell 12.4%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply grew 15.9%. By sector, alcoholic beverages and refined tea manufacturing grew 17.4%, electric power and heat production and supply 16.3%, and tobacco products 13.4%; non-ferrous metal smelting and rolling fell 16.2%, and agricultural and sideline food processing 10.6%. Among major products: industrial silicon 300,000 tons, up 2.6%; monocrystalline silicon 48,000 tons, down 41.2%; polysilicon 174,200 tons, up 1.4-fold; finished sugar 102,400 tons, down 15.2%; refined tea 34,400 tons, down 17.7%; cement 4.7032 million tons, down 5.4%; electricity generation 14.432 billion kilowatt-hours, up 28.6%. Above-scale industrial enterprises realized 2.097 billion yuan in profits and taxes, down 79%. The two major industries of green silicon and green bio-manufacturing reached above-scale output values of 16.1 billion yuan and 11.3 billion yuan respectively in 2024; the coffee planted area was 148,700 mu with output of 24,200 tons, and the full industry chain’s output value exceeded 9.2 billion yuan.

Automation applications in Baoshan are concentrated in two chains: coffee and green silicon. In coffee, Longyang District brought in Yunnan Aofu Industrial Co., Ltd., which converted primary processing into automated lines using dry-bean hulling machines, coffee cherry grading and destoning machines and other equipment; Yishu Coffee (Baoshan) Co., Ltd. built a suspended green-coffee-bean sorting and selection line — 8.6 million yuan invested, 40 m long, 22.5 m wide and 12 m high — that separates five products in one pass through eight processes including screening, gravity separation, color sorting and pulse dust removal, with a designed annual capacity of 50,000 tons and daily processing of 150 tons, all on domestically made equipment; it was called one of the largest single-line green coffee sorting lines in Asia at the time. The smart workshop of Baoshan Zhongka Food uses three intelligent sorting stages — air separation for debris, infrared color sorting and X-ray foreign-object detection — with a defective-bean rejection rate above 99%; its X-ray inspection equipment selects at about 12,000 beans per second, backed by nitrogen-flush packaging at the end of the line. These lines rely mainly on dedicated sorting equipment and machine vision; no public data are available on manipulator configurations (to be verified). In green silicon, Baoshan LONGi has completed a 21 GW automated monocrystalline silicon rod production line, and Yunnan Tongwei’s Phase 1 plant of 50,000 tons a year of high-purity polysilicon began production in 2021; monocrystalline silicon and high-purity polysilicon lines are generally equipped with automatic loading and unloading and AGV transfer, but no public data are available on specific robot counts (to be verified). No public statistics are available on automation levels in textile and stone processing (to be verified). Citywide, there are no public statistics on industrial robot stock, annual new installations or robot density (to be verified).