From the Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai to the contrast agent production line of GE Healthcare, under the new crown epidemic, Chinese multinational companies are actively responding to the global linkage, accelerating the transformation and upgrading of industrial automation, and striving to reduce the impact of supply chain disruptions caused by the epidemic.
Dai Pu, Co-President of Roland Berger's Global Management Committee, said in an interview with China Business News on April 3: "China is experiencing huge challenges brought about by the new crown epidemic in the short term, but in the long run, the fundamentals of China's economy are improving. constant."
Dai Pu has worked and lived in China for many years and has witnessed profound changes in China.
He told the First Financial Reporter: "The epidemic is making companies pay more and more attention to operating costs, improving efficiency, accelerating industrial automation and digital transformation, and demand is returning to rationality."
He also said that China has still demonstrated its resilience in the global supply chain under the epidemic, especially in emerging industries such as electric vehicle manufacturing.
Dai Pu mentioned that China already has a leading position in the electric vehicle value chain, such as chemicals and materials injected into batteries, to electric motors, covering various industries.
At the same time, China's supply chain system is also in a leading position in industries such as solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, nuclear energy and telecommunications equipment.
Take the American electric car giant Tesla as an example. Although Tesla’s super factory in China has experienced several days of shutdown in the past quarter to comply with epidemic prevention requirements, the latest delivery and production data released by Tesla on April 2 It shows that, benefiting from the increase in the production capacity of China's super factories, production deliveries in the first quarter still increased by nearly 70% year-on-year.
Tesla's Chinese supply chain has benefited Europe. In the past quarter, the Shanghai Gigafactory continued to maintain its position as the global export center, exporting electric vehicles to many European countries.
Dai Pu said: "When the global new crown epidemic caused supply chain disruption, China's manufacturing industry provided new options for the disrupted global supply chain. Although the global supply chain is gradually recovering this year, the status of China's supply chain in the world has already occurred. Variety."
Yokogawa, a Japanese industrial automation system supplier, is also actively responding to the challenges of supply chain logistics brought about by the epidemic.
Dr. Dai Yu, Director and Senior Vice President of Yokogawa Electric Corporation, told the First Financial Reporter: "The senior management of Yokogawa Electric Corporation attaches great importance to the epidemic, and has established a special cross-department and cross-regional global linkage in response to supply chain logistics. Response teams are working to minimise the impact of the outbreak by doing their best to ensure urgent needs related to the safety of people and property, as well as supply security for critical projects under construction."
Yokogawa is empowering human operations through industrial autonomy systems to accelerate the design and optimization of low-carbon new product processing across the value chain.
According to a recently released Yokogawa survey, more than half of the companies surveyed are expanding the deployment of industrial autonomy across multiple facilities and business functions to reduce manpower burdens.
"With the help of industrial autonomy technology, we can establish a comprehensive large-scale system model of the entire supply chain, industrial chain, and energy supply and demand of the enterprise, and realize the optimized management of the entire life cycle of battery energy storage." Dai Yu told the first financial reporter.
He also said that in the future, the industrial automation industry will pay more attention to coping with and solving pressing problems in society and sustainable development, including challenges such as global epidemics, global warming, resource shortages, and environmental pollution.
GE Healthcare also told the first financial reporter that the company's contrast agent factory located on Newton Road, Zhangjiang, Shanghai once conducted closed-loop production management. Nearly 100 employees were stationed in the factory to ensure the daily production of 40,000 bottles of contrast agent.
"After receiving the epidemic prevention notice last month, the factory urgently organized a small number of employees, quickly coordinated, organized various materials, and prepared materials to ensure small-scale production and meet the production needs of orders in the first quarter." GE told the first financial reporter, " We will strictly follow the relevant epidemic prevention and control requirements and measures in various places, and on the premise of protecting the health and safety of our employees, we will do our best to ensure the production of medical equipment and the daily operation of our business."