Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Nujiang's industrial history is essentially the development history of the Lanping lead-zinc mine. In 1952 work began on the Nuomidi iron plant, lead plant, Zaqing copper plant, Leidaiqing silver plant, Fulong lead plant, Biyuhe iron plant, Duoyi iron plant, and Tongdian iron plant. In June 1958 the Lanping County Committee held the county's first industrial conference, mobilizing the whole party and populace to "battle for steel and copper"; that year the county ran 15 metallurgical enterprises with 4,519 workers. In July 1959 the fourth prospecting team of the Yunnan Provincial Geological First Regional Survey Brigade entered Lanping's Jinding Fenghuangshan for a general survey. In 1971 geological engineer Shi Shaoqi proposed opening a lead mine at Jinding; after repeated trials, the Lanping County Jinding Lead Mine was formally established in August 1972, starting out with six oxen and six ox-carts; its 72 founders sold 4,357 tons of lead ore that year. In 1973 a 1.3-square-meter makeshift furnace was built, producing 351 tons of crude lead and 350,000 yuan of profit; in 1974 a 100-ton integrated mining-beneficiation-smelting enterprise was completed; in 1975 a 500 kW power station came online; in 1978 a mine with daily ore extraction of 100 tons was completed and commissioned. In 1985 annual profit and tax exceeded 1 million yuan; in 1989 a simple tower-type rectification furnace with annual capacity of 2,000 tons of refined zinc No. 1 came online, pushing annual profit and tax past 10 million yuan. In 1984 the National Reserves Commission certified Jinding's lead-zinc metal reserves at more than 14 million tons, then first in Asia. Yunnan Jinding Zinc Industry Co., Ltd. was founded in 2003; open-pit mining began in 2005 and a 100,000-ton-per-year electrolytic zinc project came online.

In 2024, Nujiang Prefecture's GDP was 27.889 billion yuan, up 4.5%. Value added of the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries was 4.202 billion yuan, 11.271 billion yuan, and 12.415 billion yuan respectively. Total industrial value added was 5.73 billion yuan, up 1.4%, and above-scale industrial value added grew 1.0%. By the three major categories, mining value added grew 31.9%, manufacturing fell 14.9%, and electricity, heat, gas, and water production and supply fell 2.2%. The industrial structure leans heavily on mining and hydropower: 28 kinds of metal deposits and 294 deposit sites have been found in the prefecture; the Lanping Jinding Fenghuangshan lead-zinc deposit has proven reserves of more than 16.64 million tons, China's second-largest proven lead-zinc deposit; and theoretical hydropower reserves exceed 20 million kW. Total societal electricity generation in 2024 was 18.329 billion kWh, down 0.2%; above-scale industrial generation was 15.563 billion kWh, down 1.3%. In specialty agriculture, tsao-ko (black cardamom) covered 74,266.67 hectares in 2024, of which 41,333.33 hectares were bearing, with fresh fruit output of 72,000 tons, up 26.1%; coffee covered 2,000 hectares, including 1,366.67 hectares of specialty varieties such as Typica, Geisha, and Yunka No. 1; and Chinese medicinal materials covered 10,746.67 hectares with dry output of 5,300 tons, up 17.8%. The prefecture's permanent population is 532,000; its industrial total ranks last among Yunnan's 16 prefectures and cities.

Nujiang's manufacturing is small in scale, and automation is almost entirely concentrated in primary processing of tsao-ko at production areas. In 2016 Yunnan Energy Investment Group and the Nujiang Prefecture government jointly founded Nujiang Prefecture Poverty-Alleviation Investment and Development Co., Ltd., investing 104 million yuan to build the Nujiang Grand Canyon Agricultural Byproduct Processing and Trading Center in Fugong County. Its main processing equipment is a heat-pump microwave smart automated line with gradient settings and real-time monitoring of feed speed and drying temperature and humidity, the country's first fully automated, high-technology-standard, high-quality-standard electric tsao-ko baking line. After two construction phases, in 2019 it reached capacity of 6,000 tons of fresh tsao-ko a year, yielding 1,400 tons of dried tsao-ko (powder). From August 2020 a second line with 3,000-ton annual capacity for dried tsao-ko was built on the second floor of the production workshop, comprising a washing line, drying line, cooling section, de-impurity line, silo area, and packaging line, with cumulative investment of about 19.8659 million yuan. The prefecture now has 39 tsao-ko processing lines with annual capacity of around 50,000 tons, 13 cold-storage facilities, and 23 cold-chain logistics vehicles; more than 90% of tsao-ko undergoes primary processing at origin. Within the Nujiang Green Spice Industrial Park, one enterprise's coffee line is equipped with two color sorters, one intelligent picking robotic manipulator, weight graders, an X-ray foreign-object detector, and two 10-square-meter freeze dryers, a rare robotic manipulator application in the prefecture. There are no public statistics on the prefecture's industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (to be verified).