Pu'er · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Pu'er's (formerly Simao Prefecture) modern industry began in the 1960s with resource-based small plants and had limited connection to the Third Front movement, centered mainly on cement, sugar, tea, forest products, and papermaking. In 1965, to relieve the acute cement shortage for capital construction in southern Yunnan, higher authorities decided to build a new cement plant below Ximen Rock in the county seat of Pu'er County, Simao Prefecture. It was designed to produce 60,000 tons of ordinary Portland cement per year on a budgeted investment of 4 million yuan, with key equipment including a ф2.2×10 m mechanized shaft kiln (disc type), a ф2.2×6.5 m raw material and clinker mill, and a ф2.5×12 m dryer — Yunnan's first mechanized shaft-kiln production line. The plant was completed and put into operation in 1970; situated at the foot of Tianbi Mountain on the western outskirts of Ning'er county seat, its product was named "Tianbi" brand cement. In tea processing, the state-run Simao Prefecture Pu'er Tea Factory was established in the 1970s as part of Yunnan's system of four major state-owned tea factories; its qizi bing (seven-cake) tea and Pu'er brick tea were exported in volume to earn foreign exchange. After the tea market was liberalized in the 1990s, the state-owned setup could not keep pace with marketization, and the OEM underwent a shareholding restructuring. There was also the state-run Simao Pharmaceutical Factory, which made Chinese patent medicines from local herbal resources, plus white sugar mills, rosin processing plants, and ferroalloy smelters set up by individual counties. Old-style papermaking was ultimately shut down and liquidated over wastewater and raw material cost problems, and county sugar, rosin, and ferroalloy plants closed in succession as outdated capacity met tightening environmental policies. Today Pu'er's industry rests on hydropower, minerals, green food, and forest products.

In 2024, Pu'er's GDP reached 11.8893 billion yuan, up 3.1%; primary industry value added was 2.7831 billion yuan, secondary industry 2.7535 billion yuan, and tertiary industry 6.3527 billion yuan, a three-sector structure of 23.4:23.2:53.4. Total industrial value added for the year was 1.7434 billion yuan, up 1.6%, while above-scale industrial value added grew 0.8%. By category, mining value added fell 23.3%, manufacturing rose 7.7%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply rose 1.1%. Key sectors showed seven gains and three declines: chemical raw materials and chemical products +29.0%, liquor, beverages and refined tea +27.5%, agricultural and sideline food processing +26.4%, non-ferrous metal smelting and rolling +11.1%, electricity and heat production and supply +1.0%; non-ferrous metal mining and dressing −28.2%, non-metallic mineral products −21.7%, pharmaceutical manufacturing −9.1%. Among main above-scale products: refined tea 8,501.81 tons and finished sugar 413,000 tons, both up 16.0%; wood-based panels 719,100 m³, pulp 291,300 tons, cement 5.492 million tons. Above-scale industrial enterprises posted operating revenue of 2.6404 billion yuan, up 4.3%, and total profit of 369 million yuan, up 55.8%. In 2024, tea output was 166,400 tons, coffee 83,900 tons, and timber 5.6372 million m³.

Automation in Pu'er is concentrated in coffee and tea processing, dominated by domestic specialized equipment and machine vision; industrial robot installations are minimal. In coffee primary processing: the high-quality coffee cherry processing center developed and built by Pu'er Fumin Agricultural Equipment Co., Ltd. debuted in Ning'er in April 2025 — the first system of its kind in China with independent intellectual property rights. It comprises a physical siphon system, black-cherry separator, spring-press pulper, green/red cherry separator, coffee demucilager, and a drop-type hot-air moisture exhaust system, and five patents have been filed. At prices prevailing at the time, it was estimated to add about 500 yuan of revenue per ton of green coffee beans. The company's fifth-generation "four-stage sorting, pulping and demucilaging system," released in March 2026, processes 8 tons of coffee cherries per hour; on a five-hour workday, daily capacity rises from 20 tons with conventional equipment to 40 tons. Four outlets automatically separate black cherries, green cherries, and large and small red cherries. Since the first model launched in 2004, cumulative sales have reached about 600 units, with exports to Uganda, Timor-Leste, and Southeast Asia. In tea, Pu'er Xinhua Guocha's workshop runs intelligent control over the full rolling, fermentation, drying, and packaging process, backed by a thousand-ton-class natural storage warehouse with 24-hour automatic temperature and humidity regulation and an IoT traceability system covering 10,000 mu of organic tea gardens; some tea companies have adopted automated withering troughs and intelligent rolling units. Coffee and tea lines rely mainly on specialized sorting, color-sorting, and pulping/demucilaging equipment; no public data exist on manipulator deployments (to be verified). No public statistics are available on the city's industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (to be verified).