Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Dali is one of the earlier industrialized areas in Yunnan, with a foundation in the local light industry and building materials of western Yunnan. On the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic, the prefecture had only 13 private enterprises with fewer than a thousand employees, mainly engaged in food processing, power generation and machinery repair. After the First Five-Year Plan was implemented, Dali drew on local resources to establish industrial enterprises centered on light industry — yarn, cloth, garments, dairy products, alcoholic beverages, sugar, cigarettes, refined tea, machine-made paper and caustic soda. By 1978, total industrial output value had grown 13.4-fold over 1949, an average annual increase of 9.6%. During and after the Third Front construction, a fairly complete local industrial system took shape in western Yunnan: in textiles, the Western Yunnan Textile Printing and Dyeing Factory, the Yunnan Man-Made Fiber Factory and the Dali Prefecture Textile Factory; in consumer goods, the Dali Cigarette Factory (originally the Xiaguan Cigar Factory), the Dali Brewery, Xiaguan Tuocha tea and Laiser Dairy; in machinery, Xiaguan manufactured “Cangshan”-brand automobiles in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1975 the Xiaguan Vehicle Factory produced the Xiaguan-brand agricultural truck with a 1.5-ton load capacity. In 2018 the prefecture had 283 above-scale industrial enterprises and a total industrial output value of 111.78 billion yuan. In industrial heritage, the Yunnan Xiaguan Tea Factory was recognized as a sixth-batch national industrial heritage site and among Yunnan’s first provincial-level industrial heritage sites.

In 2024, Dali Prefecture’s GDP reached 201.09 billion yuan, up 2.5%; value added of the secondary industry was 57.13 billion yuan. Total industrial value added for the year was 47.298 billion yuan, up 6.3%, and above-scale industrial value added grew 7.6%, ranking fifth in the province. By category, mining grew 22.7%, manufacturing 12.0%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply fell 1.1%. Driven by silicon PV, electronic equipment manufacturing grew 234.2%, pulling above-scale industrial growth up by 4.8 percentage points. Industry’s “new trio” provided strong support: value added in new-energy batteries, silicon PV and green aluminum grew 141.6%, 168.4% and 33.0% respectively, together pulling above-scale industrial growth up by 8.7 percentage points; high-tech manufacturing output value grew 78.8%. Among major products, the ten non-ferrous metals totaled 770,000 tons, up 18.8% (including 711,000 tons of primary aluminum, up 23.2%); monocrystalline silicon output rose 4.9-fold year on year and PV cells 1.9-fold. There were 327 above-scale industrial enterprises; in Xiangyun County, above-scale industrial value added grew 32% in 2024 and above-scale industrial output value exceeded 12.115 billion yuan. Structurally, Dali’s industrial aggregate ranks in the middle among Yunnan’s 16 prefectures and cities, but its growth rate is near the front, with the increment contributed mainly by the three new segments of silicon PV, new-energy batteries and green aluminum, while traditional building materials and light industry remained relatively stable.

Automation applications in Dali Prefecture focus on three directions: tobacco redrying, green aluminum and silicon PV. In tobacco, the redrying workshop of Hongta Group’s Dali Cigarette Factory carried out an in-situ technological transformation of threshing and redrying in 2022, building a 13,896-square-meter blending and material preparation workshop and a 13,500-square-meter industrial grading work area; the workshop is equipped with AGVs for unmanned material preparation, and after the retrofit the coefficient of variation of moisture in boxed finished leaf fell from 1.6% to 1.2% and that of nicotine from 2.8% to 2.3%; the industrial grading stage still retains a substantial amount of manual work. In new-energy materials, Xiangyun Hongxin New Energy’s Phase 1 of the 20 GW project reached full output and Phase 2 went into production, and Yunnan BTR’s Phase 1 went into production; in 2024 value added in new-energy batteries, silicon PV and green aluminum grew 141.6%, 168.4% and 33.0% respectively; monocrystalline silicon and cell production lines are generally equipped with automatic loading and unloading and AGVs, but no public data are available on specific robot configurations (to be verified). On the agricultural side, in 2024 Dali Prefecture produced 1.8940 million tons of vegetables, 1.6667 million tons of fruit and 550,000 tons of dairy products, but there are few robot cases in agricultural product processing: dairy filling and packaging is already widely automated, while no public statistics are available on the automation penetration rate of sorting and primary processing for vegetables, fruit and walnuts (to be verified). Dali Prefecture was selected as a pilot city for large-scale BeiDou application in the industry and information technology sector, with more than 78,000 BeiDou terminals in use, mainly for positioning and supervision of vehicles and agricultural machinery — these do not fall within the industrial robot category. There are no public statistics on the prefecture’s industrial robot stock or annual new installations (to be verified).