Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Honghe is the earliest industrialized region in Yunnan. In 1883 the Qing Yunnan Provincial Administration Commission established the Gejiu Mining Merchants' Bureau, the predecessor of Yunnan Tin; it was reorganized as the Gejiu Tin Company in 1909, and from 1909 to 1939 Gejiu's tin output at one point accounted for 90% of the national total. In September 1940 the Nationalist government, the Bank of China, and the Yunnan provincial government jointly founded Yunnan Tin Co., Ltd., which was nationalized in 1950. In 1953 Yunnan Tin was listed among the 156 key projects of the First Five-Year Plan; in 1960 it produced 20,009 tons of tin, a historical best. In 2008 Gejiu was included in the first batch of national pilots for transforming resource-depleted cities, and in November 2020 the Yunnan Tin smelter relocated out of the city into the Mengzi ETDZ. Kaiyuan is the second main thread: the first lignite was dug at the Xiaolongtan mining area in 1953, and the Kaiyuan Power Plant, launched in 1955, was one of the 156 Soviet-aided projects under the national First Five-Year Plan; when completed in 1966 it supplied 81% of the southern Yunnan grid's output. Kaiyuan's gross industrial output was just 190,000 yuan in 1949 and reached 21.109 billion yuan in 2023. Mile is a tobacco processing hub: Honghe Redrying, completed and commissioned in 1995, introduced a 12,000 kg/hour threshing-and-redrying line from the United States. These formed Honghe's early three-pillar structure of "tin, coal-power, tobacco," with Gejiu, Kaiyuan, and Mile corresponding respectively to three categories of automation demand: nonferrous metals, energy, and agricultural product processing.

In 2024, Honghe Prefecture's secondary industry value added was 106.814 billion yuan, up 6.9%, and above-scale industrial value added grew 5.4%. Manufacturing of core digital economy industries grew 12.2% and equipment manufacturing grew 10.8%; mining grew 6.0% and manufacturing grew 5.3%. Main product output: 1.2971 million tons of ten nonferrous metals, up 8.8%; 312,700 tons of electrolytic aluminum, up 19.7%; 858,700 tons of chemical fertilizer, up 13.6%. From January to November 2024, above-scale industrial enterprises in the prefecture earned operating revenue of 187.220 billion yuan, up 6.2%. By county and city: Gejiu's total industrial value added in 2024 was 14.291 billion yuan, up 3.0%, with 716,300 tons of ten nonferrous metals, including 121,800 tons of tin and 248,000 tons of primary aluminum; Kaiyuan's above-scale gross industrial output was 21.045 billion yuan; Mengzi's total gross industrial output was 66.005 billion yuan, up 3.5%, with above-scale industrial value added growing 9.1%. Yunnan Tin Group has ranked first globally in tin production and sales since 2005, with about one-quarter of the world market and about one-half of the domestic market. In industrial layout, nonferrous metals (Gejiu tin, Luxi aluminum) and chemicals (Kaiyuan fertilizer, Jiehua) form the main body; tobacco redrying is concentrated in Mile; and food processing and plateau specialty agriculture are distributed across Mengzi and Jianshui.

Honghe's main industrial robot scenarios are tin smelting and electrolytic aluminum. At its digitalized tin smelting plant in Gejiu, Yunnan Tin has deployed straight-line casting robot arms, 5G+RGV, and 5G remote-controlled overhead cranes. The plant integrates more than 20,000 real-time operating points, raising operational management efficiency by nearly 20% and cutting labor input by nearly 40%. It is a classic case of robot substitution under high-temperature, heavy-load, continuous-casting conditions, and "Yunnan Tin 5G Digital Factory" was selected for MIIT's 2025 5G Factory Catalog. In electrolytic aluminum, Yunnan Honghe New Materials in Luxi applies fully automatic slag-skimming robots in anode assembly and casting workshops, handling slag skimming and casting of 1,450 degrees Celsius hot metal and molten aluminum. In tobacco, Honghe Redrying in Mile has built a production collaboration and operations system on a 5G network; in the pre-laying material preparation area, latent AGVs and forklifts handle automatic stacking and feeding. In agriculture, Mile's total agricultural machinery power reached 533,200 kW in 2024 with a mechanization rate of 73.2%, and the city has organized a "Silver Wings" drone crop-protection service team. The Kaiyuan food processing industrial park posted output of 1.943 billion yuan in 2024, and soybean products within the park already run on automated lines. In 2024 Honghe produced 3.8390 million tons of fruit and 4.9389 million tons of vegetables; there are no public statistics on automation rates for sorting and primary processing of these two categories (to be verified), nor on the prefecture's industrial robot base and annual new installations (to be verified).