Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Chuxiong’s modern industry began with the Third Front construction. After 1964, the Sixth Ministry of Machine Building Industry laid out a torpedo R&D and production system in Yunnan covering 10 factories, one research institute and one test site, dispersed deep in the mountains of Qujing, Chuxiong and elsewhere. Among them, State-Owned Southwest Long March Machinery Plant (Plant 5042) was sited in the second half of 1968 at Tangbeichong, Tuguan Commune, Lufeng County, Chuxiong, and broke ground in spring 1969; State-Owned Southwest Chunguang Machinery Plant (Plant 5082) was also located in a mountain gully near Tuguan Town in Lufeng, serving as the instrumentation workshop of the torpedo plant. In 1978 the three plants were transferred to the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building Industry; after conversion to civilian production, the Long March Machinery Plant began independently developing refrigerators in 1983, and “Orchid”-brand refrigerators entered batch production in September 1984. In mining and metallurgy, after 1964 Yunnan newly built the Muding Copper Mine and the Dayao Copper Mine; the Dayao Liuju Copper Mine was completed and put into operation in 1978 and formally named in 1986 — at its peak it employed more than 10,000 mine workers, and copper output exceeded 10,000 tons in 1994 (data on this mine come from media compilations; some years to be verified). In tobacco, the Chuxiong Cigarette Factory once produced more than 100,000 cases of “Butterfly Spring” cigarettes a year, and in 1998 it was merged into Hongta Group as a subsidiary. The machining capacity left by the Third Front construction became the source of technology and workers for Lufeng’s later CNC machine tool industrial cluster.

In 2024, Chuxiong Prefecture’s GDP reached 201.895 billion yuan, up 2.7%; value added of the secondary industry was 81.691 billion yuan, and industrial value added rose from 24.5% of GDP in 2020 to 26.0% in 2024. Above-scale industrial value added fell 3.0% for the year: mining down 2.2%, manufacturing down 7.3%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply up 13.8%. Hit by falling silicon prices, value added in computer, communications and other electronic equipment manufacturing — represented by green silicon — fell 34.6%; chemical raw materials and chemical products manufacturing grew 22.2%, electric power and heat production and supply 14.2%, and tobacco products 1.6%. In January–November, above-scale industrial enterprises achieved operating revenue of 107.97 billion yuan, down 17.8%. The “5+6” key industries generated 125.884 billion yuan of value added in 2024, accounting for 62.4% of GDP. The new energy industry ranks first in the province in scale: 13.05 million kilowatts of new-energy capacity have been approved since the start of the 14th Five-Year Plan, with 4.76 million kilowatts newly connected to the grid in 2024; society-wide electricity generation in 2024 was 25.984 billion kilowatt-hours, up 26.6%. Lufeng City has formed a green intelligent equipment manufacturing segment with Jinrun CNC as chain leader; in 2025 the city’s green intelligent equipment manufacturing industry achieved 1.24 billion yuan of output value. Chuxiong is the prefecture in Yunnan whose industrial structure most prominently features “green silicon + new energy + titanium”, but the 2024 slide in silicon prices directly dragged on above-scale industrial growth.

Chuxiong’s automation demand is concentrated in three lines: CNC equipment, titanium and vanadium-titanium smelting, and tobacco redrying. With Jinrun CNC as “chain leader”, Lufeng City has built the country’s largest production base for turret-type radial milling machines and has incubated and cultivated 43 machinery manufacturing and related enterprises; 49 upstream and downstream enterprises have moved into the Bicheng Intelligent CNC Equipment Manufacturing Industrial Park; in 2025 the city’s green intelligent equipment manufacturing industry achieved 1.24 billion yuan of output value; and the 60-million-yuan project for 1,000 CNC machine tools a year with five-axis cradle turntables has been completed and entered trial production. Yunnan Jinrun CNC’s Phase 1 industrial internet project was selected for the 2023 national-level industrial internet pilot demonstration list. In titanium smelting, the contract for automatic sorting robots has been signed for Yunnan Guotai Metal’s smart upgrade project for aviation-grade sponge titanium. In tobacco, the Chuxiong Redrying Plant has built a smart warehouse based on “5G + AGV + vision AI + data warehouse”, automating the weighing, near-infrared inspection, temporary storage and in-and-out warehousing of graded raw leaf. On the agricultural side, in 2024 value added of Chuxiong Prefecture’s plateau-characteristic modern agriculture and green food manufacturing reached 37.651 billion yuan, up 1.5%, but public cases of robot use in food processing are few: no public statistics are available on the automation penetration rate of sorting and primary processing for walnuts, wild mushrooms, traditional Chinese medicinal materials and similar categories (to be verified); nor are there public statistics on the prefecture’s industrial robot stock or annual new installations (to be verified).