Zhaotong · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Under the periodization of Zhaotong's "14th Five-Year Plan" for high-quality industrial development, Zhaotong's industry passed through five landmark stages: takeoff in the 1950s; the founding of the Zhaotong Cigarette Factory in the 1970s; completion of all fertilizer units at the Yunnan Natural Gas Chemical Plant in the 1980s; the rise of cement-led building materials and lead-zinc and coal-led mining/metallurgy from the 1990s through the first decade of the new century; completion and commissioning of the Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba hydropower stations and the Weixin and Zhenxiong thermal power plants during the "12th Five-Year Plan" period; and, since the "13th Five-Year Plan," the siting and construction of a 700,000-ton green aluminum project and Hoshine Silicon Industry's green silicon circular-economy project. Shuifu is a classic "city built around a factory": in April 1974 the Yunnan Natural Gas Chemical Plant was sited at Gunkanba; the State Council approved transferring the Shuidong, Shuihe, and Anfu communes from Yibin County, Sichuan, to Yunnan, and Shuifu District was established on July 1 that year. Yuntianhua began production in October 1977 — qualified urea came off the line on October 29 and qualified synthetic ammonia on October 30; on November 1 the first train loaded with urea and ammonia water departed Shuifu for Kunming. The Zhaotong Cigarette Factory was founded in 1970, entered the state's planned cigarette factory system in 1978, merged and restructured with the Honghe Cigarette Factory in 2005, and was renamed the Hongta Tobacco (Group) Co., Ltd. Zhaotong Cigarette Factory in 2008; it has an annual comprehensive cigarette capacity of 800,000 cases on a 700,000 m² site. On the private side, Yunnan Haolong Industrial Group, established in 1998, now operates seven lead-zinc mines, three coal mines, and four lead-zinc concentrators, producing 80,000 tons of lead-zinc concentrate per year, and has developed seven hydropower stations.

In 2024, Zhaotong's GDP was 201.691 billion yuan, up 4.6% — 1.3 percentage points above the provincial growth rate and fourth in the province; total industrial value added was 47.151 billion yuan, up 6.5%; above-scale industrial value added grew 7.5%, sixth in the province. Among the three major categories, mining fell 2.8%, manufacturing grew 11.6%, and electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply grew 6.5%. Across seven key sectors — six up, one down: power production and supply +7.1%, tobacco products +1.6%, non-ferrous metal smelting and rolling +58.3%, non-metallic mineral products +19.5%; coal mining and dressing −13.6%. Main products: cigarettes 600,200 cases, up 5.9%; power generation 89.987 billion kWh, up 9% (hydropower 77.028 billion kWh, thermal power 10.91 billion kWh; clean power 87.8% of the total); primary aluminum (electrolytic aluminum) 687,600 tons, up 30.4%; ten non-ferrous metals 737,600 tons, up 20.9%. For the year, above-scale industrial enterprises posted main-business revenue of 93.264 billion yuan, up 23.1%, and total profit of 12.304 billion yuan, up 6%. Key projects — Chinalco's 400,000-ton aluminum alloy slab ingot line, Hoshine's 400,000 tons of industrial silicon, and Xinan Chemical's 150,000 tons of industrial silicon — were fired up in succession, shifting the industrial structure from the traditional "power, tobacco, coal" mix toward "silicon, aluminum, phosphorus."

Zhaotong's manufacturing volume is concentrated in power, tobacco, aluminum, and silicon; public cases of robots and machine vision currently appear mainly in postharvest apple handling. Zhaoyang District has built 8 modern intelligent apple sorting lines with a combined capacity of 115 tons per hour, sorting 380,000 tons of apples per year, supported by 279 cold stores for pre-cooling, turnover, and order-based delivery. A single line works as follows: apples enter a water tank, where buoyancy carries them without bruising; a roller elevator lifts them into a spray-washing zone and a hot-air drying zone; they then enter the intelligent imaging, inspection, and sorting zone, where four sets of HD cameras perform 360-degree scans, detecting surface blemishes, color uniformity, fruit diameter, and single-fruit weight, plus indicators hard to judge by eye such as sugar content, sugar-core quality, browning, and moldy core disease. Qualified fruits are bound to a unique "ID number" and diverted by grade through dedicated outlets. According to the enterprise, the line sorts about 20 tons of apples per hour — roughly 100,000 pieces. Another report says the city has put 16 intelligent sorting lines into service with a combined 200 tons per hour, which conflicts with the "8 lines / 115 tons per hour" figures (to be verified). In 2026 the city's apple planting area totals 850,000 mu, including 196,300 mu of early-maturing varieties; output is projected at 1.4 million tons, and the comprehensive output value is expected to exceed 16 billion yuan. Automation levels are relatively high in the tobacco, hydropower, and electrolytic aluminum stages, but no public data exist on AGV and machine-vision deployment counts (to be verified); nor are there public statistics on the city's industrial robot base, annual new installations, or robot density (to be verified).