Lincang · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Lincang's modern industry began with tea and sugar. In autumn 1938, Feng Shaoqiu, dispatched by the China Tea Company, successfully trial-produced black tea in Shunning; in March 1939 the Shunning Experimental Tea Factory of Yunnan China Tea Co., Ltd. was founded and produced finished tea within its first year. During startup, Feng designed his own "three-drum hand roller," "pedal-and-power dual-use tea roller," and "pedal-and-power dual-use tea dryer," pioneering machine-made black tea in China. The factory was renamed Shunning Tea Factory in 1950 and Fengqing Tea Factory in 1954 after the county; it was a central foreign-trade enterprise until 1970 and was restructured in December 1996 as Yunnan Dianhong Group Co., Ltd. The old factory compound was designated a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit (eighth batch) by the State Council in 2019 and a National Industrial Heritage Site (third batch) by MIIT the same year. In sugar, the state-owned Yunxian Mechanized Sugar Mill came online in 1958 with a daily cane-crushing capacity of 100 tons, the earliest mechanized sugar plant in southwest Yunnan; besides white and brown sugar it brewed liquor from bagasse. State-owned sugar mills were subsequently built in border counties such as Gengma, Yongde, and Cangyuan. In light industry, the Lincang County Shoe Factory grew out of a 1956 leather cooperative, producing "Orchid Brand" cloth shoes and Qianmo leather shoes, hundreds of thousands of pairs a year, until it stopped production after its 2004 restructuring; there were also the Lincang Chemical Fertilizer Plant and the state-owned Bangdong Paper Mill, the latter drawing on bamboo and timber resources along the Lancang River. In 2024 the city's above-scale industrial value added grew 4.1%; its industrial base remains weak among Yunnan's 16 prefectures and cities.

In 2024, Lincang's GDP was 115.019 billion yuan, up 3.7%; secondary industry value added was 28.064 billion yuan, up 3.7%; total industrial value added was 18.397 billion yuan, up 3.7%; above-scale industrial value added grew 4.1%; light industry grew 0.9% and heavy industry grew 8.4%; and 27 enterprises were newly promoted to above-scale status. By sector, chemical raw materials and chemical products manufacturing grew 43.8%, pharmaceutical manufacturing grew 15.6%, electricity and heat production and supply grew 13.6%, and agricultural and sideline food processing grew 5.1%; liquor, beverage, and refined tea manufacturing fell 0.9%, and nonferrous metal smelting and rolling fell 15.6%. Equipment manufacturing grew 173% and the energy industry grew 13.7%. Main products: 1.0939 million tons of finished sugar, up 13.6%; 97,000 kL of fermentation alcohol, up 13.7%; 31,700 tons of refined tea, down 8.0%; 39,600 tons of nuts, down 43.0%; 61,500 tons of industrial silicon, up 9.9%; 105,700 tons of granulated rubber, down 27.8%; 3.5989 million tons of cement, down 18.8%. Above-scale industrial electricity generation was 19.375 billion kWh, up 20.8%; solar power generation grew 176.5%; and clean power accounted for 98.6%. Above-scale industrial enterprises earned 4.285 billion yuan in profit and tax, up 8.6%.

Lincang's automation is concentrated in two agricultural processing lines, nuts and tea, and consists mainly of dedicated equipment and machine-vision applications, with very few industrial robots. In nuts: in 2024, at the initiative of the Lincang Rural Industry Development Group, 153 nut enterprises, cooperatives, and large growers formed the Lincang Nut Alliance, which worked with research institutes to build the country's first production line integrating intelligent grading, dehulling, washing, flotation separation, drying, and cold-storage preservation. The city has 81 primary nut processing lines with capacity of 330,000 tons and 36 deep-processing lines with capacity of 65,000 tons; full-chain output exceeded 11 billion yuan in 2025. Equipment configuration is visible in government procurement records: the nut processing plant project in Boxiang Town, Linxiang District, was awarded in October 2025 for 2.4125 million yuan; the equipment list includes a precision nut grading sieve, an X-ray machine (Valor 3C), a green-nut dehuller, an in-shell nut color sorter (6SXL-1200MD2Y), a finished-product elevator, packing equipment, control cabinets, and a complete control system, a classic "grading sieve plus color sorter plus X-ray foreign-object detection" combination. In tea, Dianhong (Yunnan black tea) companies already apply automatic temperature-humidity control and smart rolling systems; local media report that the pass rate of Fengqing County black tea products rose from 90% to 99% (figure from local media, to be verified). There are no public statistics on the city's industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (to be verified).