Yuxi · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Yuxi's industry began with tobacco processing. At the 1953 national flue-cured tobacco conference, Yuxi's "Da Jinyuan" leaf scored 108 points — the highest in the country. In May 1956, the Yuxi Tobacco Leaf Redrying Plant, built with an investment of 2.947 million yuan, broke ground on the western foot of Hongta Mountain; completed and operational by August, it received nine redrying machines, leaf conditioners, and balers transferred from Shanghai Cigarette Factory No. 2. It was renamed the Yuxi Flue-Cured Tobacco Plant in 1957. In early 1958 the provincial government allocated 1.8 million yuan to expand it into the Yuxi Cigarette Factory, with 30 cigarette-making machines transferred from Shanghai's Huamei Tobacco Factory; that September it produced the first pack of "Hongtashan" cigarettes, and in 1959 it was renamed the Yunnan Yuxi Cigarette Factory. In 1981 the factory pledged all its assets as collateral to import MK9-5 maker-tippers from Britain's Molins, opening a first round of high-starting-point technical upgrading; from 1981 to 1990 it invested a cumulative 250 million yuan and imported 89 machines (sets). In 1991 the Yuxi Cigarette Factory became the tobacco industry's only "National First-Class Enterprise," and in September 1995 Yuxi Hongta Tobacco (Group) Co., Ltd. was formed around it as the core. During the Third Front period, the Yuxi Machine Tool Plant was placed on the machinery industry's renovation and expansion list. In mining and metallurgy, the Dahongshan iron mine in Xinping County and steel capacity in Eshan County formed the second main line of Yuxi industry; Dahongshan has cumulatively identified iron ore resources of 456 million tons, ranking among China's extra-large underground iron mines.

In 2024, Yuxi's GDP was 258.21 billion yuan, up 3.8%; secondary industry value added was 108.45 billion yuan, up 3.0%; and the industrialization rate of 36.64% ranked first in the province. Total industrial value added for the year was 94.62 billion yuan, up 1.6%; above-scale industrial value added grew 1.5%, and above-scale industrial enterprises posted operating revenue of 207.52 billion yuan. By sector: tobacco products grew 1.5%, pulling above-scale industrial growth by 0.95 percentage points; metal products grew 39.6%; comprehensive utilization of waste resources grew 22.6%; pharmaceutical manufacturing fell 15.3%. Among main products: steel 10.687 million tons, up 2.5%; yellow phosphorus 142,000 tons, up 9.4%. In terms of industrial organization, Yuxi's "two strong, two new" sectors accounted for 70.1% of the city's gross industrial output value: cigarettes and supporting industries delivered an output value of 64.36 billion yuan, and green steel 81.8 billion yuan, with the share of mid-to-high-end plate products rising from 16% to 61%. At the county level, Hongta District's 2024 GDP was 113.43 billion yuan — 43.92% of the city total — with secondary industry accounting for 62.16% of its value added; Xinping County, anchored by the Dahongshan iron mine, has formed a mining, dressing, and metallurgy sector, with Dahongshan Mining producing 4 million tons of iron concentrate per year. Structurally, tobacco remains Yuxi's primary pillar for industrial value added and tax revenue, though its share has edged down in recent years; steel and mining/metallurgy form the second support, while biopharmaceuticals and new-energy battery materials are still being cultivated.

Yuxi's automation retrofits are concentrated in cigarettes, steel, and mining. In cigarettes, Hongta Group's Yuxi Cigarette Factory launched an in-situ technical retrofit in April 2022: its primary processing line established a one-touch intelligent control mode with preset parameters and automatic in-process correction; casing deviation fell 54.03% and flavoring precision improved 31.2%. In logistics, latent AGVs were newly introduced, and in 2025 an eight-aisle "intelligent interchange" logistics system was completed, with automatic sorting and centralized palletizing in the finished-goods warehouse, cutting fixed conveying equipment by two-thirds. The plant has deployed 28 smart scenarios and over 60,000 data points, and in May 2025 it was rated an advanced-level smart factory in the tobacco industry. In steel, Yukun Steel Group launched a 437-million-yuan digital intelligent platform project in January 2023; its automatic raw-material sampling station has six unmanned lanes, completing per-vehicle sampling within 5 minutes and weighing in 1–2 minutes. In mining, Yuxi Dahongshan Mining has invested a cumulative 320 million yuan since 2018 to build a digital mine, completing China's first autonomous-driving system for a 6 m³ electric load-haul-dump machine, a 180 m unmanned rail transport system, and a 5G + automatic sampling robot; underground personnel fell from 2,900 person-times in 2016 to 600. On the agricultural side, in 2024 Yuxi produced 3.43331 million tons of vegetables and edible fungi and 1.69587 million tons of orchard fruit; no public statistics are available on postharvest sorting automation levels (to be verified). No public statistics exist on the city's industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (units per 10,000 industrial workers, IFR basis) (to be verified).