Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Before the prefecture was founded, Xishuangbanna had virtually no industry; only the Fohai Tea Factory was modern in nature, while the rest consisted of folk handicraft workshops — salt making, weaving, dyeing and printing, brewing, tea making, and brown sugar pressing. In 1954 its first industrial enterprise, the Jingde Factory, was established, followed by eight state-owned enterprises including the Menghai Tea Factory, Jinghong Commercial Food Factory, the Xishuangbanna Newspaper printing plant, and grain processing plants in the three counties, moving the prefecture's industry from handicraft workshops toward machine production. In 1961 the Liusha River power station began generating and the Puwen Sugar Mill started crushing; Xishuangbanna Chemical Fertilizer Plant, the Menghai Dahegou Coal Mine, and other industrial and mining enterprises followed. In the late 1970s, industrial investment tilted toward energy, basic industries, and key backbone enterprises: phase II of the Menghai Binfang power station and other power projects were completed, along with Xishuangbanna Cement Plant, a machine-made brick plant, and four sugar mills at Jingzhen, Meng'a, Mengpeng, and Mengla. Through the 1980s, projects in natural rubber processing, power, building materials, tea, sugar, food, beverages, ethnic handicrafts, and pharmaceuticals were built in succession. In 1987 the prefecture's gross industrial output value broke 100 million yuan for the first time, reaching 106 million yuan; by 1993 an industrial system with tea, sugar, building materials, and power as its backbone had taken shape, with gross output of 452 million yuan. Since the 18th Party Congress, a pattern centered on power generation, refined tea processing, synthetic rubber manufacturing, sugar, and mining has formed; in 2022 above-scale gross industrial output reached 27.131 billion yuan — 52,000 times the 520,000 yuan recorded in 1953.

In 2024, Xishuangbanna Prefecture's GDP was 90.180 billion yuan, up 3.7%; primary, secondary, and tertiary industry value added came in at 19.060 billion, 20.638 billion, and 50.482 billion yuan respectively. Above-scale industrial value added fell 6.2% for the year. By category, mining grew 11.9%, manufacturing fell 13.4%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply grew 4.3%. Across seven key sectors — four up, one flat, two down: iron ore mining and dressing +16.0%, sugar +11.1%, power supply +10.4%, non-metallic mineral products +0.5%; power generation flat; synthetic rubber manufacturing −1.4%, refined tea processing −26.9%. Above-scale industrial enterprises posted operating revenue of 25.274 billion yuan, up 9.5%, and total profit of 1.634 billion yuan, down 24.9%. Society-wide power generation was 6.198 billion kWh, up 5.9%. On the agricultural side: rubber area 4.6581 million mu, dry rubber output 357,300 tons (up 5.9%), tea 68,800 tons (up 3.5%), sugarcane 1.0561 million tons, fruit 1.4456 million tons, and vegetables 574,700 tons. The prefecture received 70.44 million domestic and overseas tourist visits for the year, with total tourism spending of 105.8 billion yuan; the combined full-industry-chain output value of its seven major industries broke 310 billion yuan. Its industrial aggregate is on the small side among Yunnan's 16 prefectures — an economy led by tourism and tropical-zone agriculture.

Xishuangbanna's automation cases are concentrated in the tea and rubber chains, with the Menghai Tea Factory's sorting-and-picking robot a rare industrial robot application in the prefecture. In 2023 the Menghai Tea Factory partnered with Guangzhou Guangxin Technology Co., Ltd. to develop an intelligent picking line using "vision + spectroscopy": sun-dried crude tea is spread evenly on a conveyor belt, where machine vision and infrared spectroscopy detect impurities such as hair, pebbles, and twigs, and a manipulator picks out the foreign objects once identified. The line began trial runs in 2024 and entered formal production in May 2025; after more than a year of operation it is at a mature application stage, achieving a 100% impurity removal rate at roughly three times manual efficiency, and cutting the process's workforce from 4 workers to 1. Dayi (Menghai Tea Industry) has completed intelligent fermentation tanks, a digitized cluster drying room, and an intelligent production line; it introduced robots and double-speed chain technology to build an automated cake-pressing pilot line, and its steam sterilization line achieved a process breakthrough in sterilizing loose tea. Chensheng Tea Factory built an anti-counterfeit traceability system. In rubber, Tianye Rubber completed an automation retrofit of its production line, and Jingyang Rubber built a digitized raw-material procurement system and a remote networked HD video platform for production-safety monitoring. These retrofits rely mainly on specialized equipment and machine vision; no public data exist on installed counts of six-axis robots, SCARA and parallel robots, or AGVs (to be verified); nor are there public statistics on the prefecture's industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (to be verified).