The rapid development of Dongguan .
"World Factory" Dongguan is undergoing huge changes.
There are factories everywhere and "workers" everywhere. At one time, people's stereotype of Dongguan . However, since the international financial crisis in 2008, Dongguan has entered the path of transformation and innovation, dominated by the information technology industry, gathering emerging industries such as high-end equipment manufacturing, artificial intelligence , new materials, and new energy. It also focuses on Songshan Lake Science City, covering scientific research tools such as China Spallation Neutron Source and Southern Advanced Light Source.
Today, Dongguan has entered a new path of "intelligent manufacturing + science and technology innovation".
At the beginning of this year, Dongguan announced its economic operation. In 2021, Dongguan's regional GDP exceeded one trillion yuan mark, officially joining the "GDP trillion club ". As a result, Dongguan has also become the third "double ten thousand" city in Guangdong Province with "GDP exceeding one trillion" and "permanent population exceeding ten million".
In the "double ten thousand" era, Dongguan, which is in the C position of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, has been given new expectations. In August this year, the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government issued the "Opinions on Supporting Dongguan to Accelerate High-Quality Development in the New Era to Build a Strong City in Science and Technology Innovation and Manufacturing", listing "Creating a Strong City in Science and Technology Innovation and Advanced Manufacturing" as the goal of Dongguan's rise in the new era.
Today, Dongguan is moving towards a Bay Area innovation highland with global influence.
is located in the China Spallation Neutron Source in Dongguan. Source: Southern Daily
"World Factory" rose. In 11978, the Taiping Handbag Factory with the license number "Guangxi 001" settled in Humen, Dongguan. As China's first batch of " three to one supplement " enterprises, the establishment of Taiping Handbag Factory officially kicked off the curtain of the "Made in Dongguan".
In July of that year, the State Council issued the "Trial Measures for the Carrying Outer Assembly Business", and Dongguan people also called this document "Document No. 22". The document announced that Guangdong, Fujian and other places will be piloted to carry out the "three come and one supplement" business, namely, foreign incoming materials processing, sample processing, and incoming parts assembly, which can compensate for trade .
Before this, Dongguan had almost no manufacturing foundation, and the emergence of "Document No. 22" changed this history.
has taken the wind of policy. Dongguan seized the opportunity under the conditions of "three no" of no production equipment, no material production, and no product sales. On the fifth day of the issuance of "Document No. 22", Hong Kong businessmen visited Dongguan and quickly selected a site to prepare for the Taiping Handbag Factory. Then Dongguan quickly formed a rural industrial development model of "ignition in every village and smoking in every household".
At that time, there were no industrial factories, so Dongguan people used idle ancestral halls, synagogues, canteens, warehouses, etc. as temporary factories, first founded incoming materials processing plants to develop the economy, and then accumulated funds before investing in the construction of standardized factories. From nothing to something, from something to many, through this method, Dongguan has achieved the "primitive accumulation" of rural industrialization. This history is also called "borrowing a boat to go to sea" and "borrowing chickens to lay eggs" by people in Dongguan. The opportunity of
"three come and one make up" has made Dongguan, an agricultural county, which originally had a population of more than 1.1 million, jumped into a well-known manufacturing center. For a time, Hong Kong businessmen, Taiwanese businessmen and foreign companies flocked to each other, and factories sprung up like mushrooms in Dongguan after a rain. Millions of farmers in Dongguan were the first in the country to achieve a large-scale "wash their feet and go to the fields".
From 1978 to 2008, in 30 years, Dongguan has undergone several outward-oriented economic structural adjustments, and modern manufacturing , represented by the information industry, emerged suddenly. "Made in Dongguan" is sold around the world, and Dongguan is also known as the "world factory". In 2000, Li Zufan, then vice president of IBM Asia, commented on the importance of Dongguan in the global industrial chain and said: "If the highway from Dongguan to Shenzhen is stuck in traffic, 70% of the world's computer products will be out of stock."
However, with the deepening development of processing trade business, limited land resources and high degree of outward dependence are becoming increasingly prominent. The outbreak of the international financial crisis in 2008 has accelerated the pace of transformation, which has changed rapidly and has never stopped evolving in manufacturing.
In fact, Dongguan has been planning the path of transformation long before the international financial crisis came.In January 2007, the 12th Party Congress of Dongguan City officially established the development strategy of "promoting the dual transformation of economy and society", which is to transform a resource-led economy to an innovation-led economy.
Under the "forced" of the financial crisis, Dongguan, which was fully prepared, quickly entered a new path of innovative development. In May of that year, Dongguan launched a pilot program for industrial structure adjustment and upgrading in the city, and formulated a "1+26" policy system, such as increasing the special funds for the "Science and Technology Dongguan" project to 2 billion yuan per year; and introducing the "eight 1 billion yuan" assistance policies. Timely transformation has brought new vitality to this "world factory".
breaking through with independent innovation in this year of Dongguan’s transformation, veterans selling injection molding machine peripheral equipment Wu Fengli also realized that "without core technology, they will always be controlled by others." With 500,000 yuan in start-up capital, he founded Guangdong Tosda Technology Co., Ltd. , which transformed from selling foreign injection molding machine equipment to independent research and development and production.
Zhang Peng, who is currently the general manager of Tosda Robot Business Department, also joined Tosda this year. He introduced to The Paper that Tosda initially focused on developing peripheral equipment for injection molding machines, but by chance, Tosda began to enter the field of automation equipment. "At that time, our boss went to the factory to visit and happened to meet a team leader who was also a veteran. The two of them wanted to fight with . At this time, they found out that the team leader had only 4 fingers. After understanding, they knew that the team leader closed the molding machine, but they didn't have time to pull out the hand." The founder Wu Fengli realized for the first time that behind the development of , a traditional labor-intensive enterprise, was that workers exchanged their bodies for money, and the development of automation equipment could greatly improve this problem.
But the road of independent research and development is not easy to follow. At that time, domestic enterprises could only assemble foreign automation equipment before conducting OEM sales. They had no core technology in control and servo, and were very passive. Zhang Peng said that automation equipment needs programs to operate, and foreign programs were blocked at that time. If there were problems in the future, or debugging or changing parameters, they must be operated by foreign companies, and the initiative is completely in the hands of others. At that time, no private enterprises in China were involved in the field of automation equipment and talents were scarce, so Tosda spent a lot of time on preparing for the team. "But if you want to make automation products, you must do independent research and development. If you do not master the core technology, it will be difficult for the company to develop for a long time," said Zhang Peng.
In 2011, Tosda successfully launched the first self-developed robot control system, and then the independently developed five-axis and three-axis servo robots were successively launched, realizing independent substitution and rapidly expanding their market share within three years.
With the help of independent innovation, Tosda's control system hardware cost was only 1/10 of the control system cost purchased from Japan at that time. Moreover, Tosda's robot control system is completely open to customers, solving the problems faced by domestic manufacturers when using imported equipment such as "high prices and untimely service".
When Tosda was making great progress, in 2009, Dongguan Hele Electronics Co., Ltd., a small factory with only more than 30 people was established. This company, which originally made OEMs in overseas brand headphones, keenly smelled the policy trends.
In 2010, Dongguan and Suzhou became a national pilot city for the transformation and upgrading of processing trade. At the end of the following year, Dongguan formally established the strategic decision to "accelerate transformation and upgrading, build a happy Dongguan, and achieve high-level rise" at the 13th Party Congress, and introduced a series of policies to promote the transformation and upgrading of processing trade.
, which has just been established, , Hele Electronics, has followed Dongguan's development strategy. In the past ten years, it has developed from the initial processing and OEM to a national high-tech enterprise , integrating production, research and sales, specializing in the production of wireless audio equipment , and has cultivated the core brand QCY. In 2020, Hele Electronics' industrial output value has exceeded 1 billion yuan.
Under the continuous and vigorous reform, by 2015, Dongguan, on the premise of ensuring that the growth rate does not decline, promoted economic transformation and upgrading by optimizing the economic structure, the added value of advanced manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing has accounted for 47% and 36% respectively, while the traditional manufacturing industry has dropped from 22.9% in 2010 to 18.8%.
Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory Phase I Project (first batch). Source: Dongguan Urban Construction Engineering Management Bureau website
"Smart Manufacturing" polishes the golden signboard
Dongguan is focusing on the big and not letting go of the small in addition to the strategic transformation and upgrading of the city. At the same time, it promotes differentiated and personalized development of enterprises, encourages enterprises to vigorously develop the real economy and enhance core competitiveness.
For a long time, Dongguan, the "world factory", has relied on the advantages of cheap labor to support industrial development, but under the new trend of economic development, how to liberate productivity and increase cost and manpower advantages has become a new topic.
With the introduction of the concept of Industry 4.0, in August 2014, the Dongguan Municipal Government issued the "Dongguan City Action Plan for Promoting the "Machine Replacement" of Enterprises (2014-2016)", liberating workers from intensive labor on the assembly line and transforming them into technical talents, while reducing the labor costs of enterprises and improving product quality. To this end, the Dongguan Municipal Government allocates no less than 200 million yuan each year to fund enterprises to use advanced automation equipment to carry out a new round of technological transformation.
, Tosda, which focuses on the independent research and development of automation equipment, has also joined the huge " machine replacement " campaign, as an enterprise providing automation solutions.
"At that time, the government was vigorously promoting and organized several of our automation equipment units to conduct tour reports in several towns in Dongguan to introduce the benefits of industrial automation and intelligence. At the same time, if the plan is implemented, the government will subsidize 30% of the funds. At that time, the enthusiasm of the enterprises was very high." Zhang Peng said that after each report, many enterprises would contact them, and he clearly felt the significant impact of this action on the entire manufacturing industry in Dongguan.
Zhang Peng told The Paper that when the three-year "machine replacement" campaign was initially implemented, most companies were passive transformations, and they were mainly large enterprises, and the subjective transformation awareness of small factories was not strong. However, with the encouragement and subsidies of the government, the transformed enterprises quickly tasted the sweetness of automation and intelligence, and encouraged more waiting and watching enterprises. Therefore, even after the "machine replacement" program is over, more and more companies are starting to seek automation transformation.
was the year after the implementation of the "Machine Replacement" plan. In 2015, a furniture factory in Houjie, Dongguan took the lead in the software furniture industry to enter the path of digital reform.
brand was established in 2004 with Moos Healthy Sleep Co., Ltd. . At that time, it had been deeply engaged in Dongguan for more than 10 years. "Affected by the overall labor costs in the Pearl River Delta, our labor costs have increased by more than 8% each year, and the drawbacks of traditional production organization methods are becoming increasingly prominent as the scale of operations expands, such as backward management methods, low production efficiency, high operating costs, etc., prompting us to find new paths." Chen Wenze, head of the Process Information Center of Mussi Co., Ltd., said that these bottlenecks, coupled with the country's continuous promotion of digitalization strategies, have made them determined to explore the digital transformation of .
However, the initial transformation was not smooth. "The data was weak at that time, the workers did not have a deep understanding of digitalization, the process system was not perfect, and there were almost no companies to refer to." In the early stages of transformation, from production line design, equipment customization to control system development, Mousse is equivalent to exploring in the "no man's land".
They have established a special digital research institute and cooperated with Siemens , Shule, Lienpai and other companies to introduce global advanced automation and intelligent equipment and industrial processes, maximizing the process of process dataization, production automation, information automation, and logistics automation in the manufacturing process. "In the end, we can realize the automation of all processes from customer orders to product delivery."
In the past, the edge of a mattress required multiple workers to constantly flip the mattress manually, which was inefficient and unstable in quality.After the transformation, workers can control machine operations by just moving their fingers, which not only improves production efficiency and reduces the delivery cycle, but also increases the product pass rate from the original 95% to 99.5%.
Today, Moos has become the only furniture company in Dongguan currently listed on the A-share main board, and its digital factory has also become a model of industry transformation.
After the three-year "machine replacement" plan was completed, Dongguan did not give up the path of intelligent transformation of traditional manufacturing. Data shows that from 2018 to 2020, Dongguan provided funding for digital transformation to more than 1,200 enterprises, achieving an average increase of 223% for the entire employee labor productivity of enterprises. Through the industrial Internet digital upgrade policy, a number of enterprises were also guided to build industrial-grade network platforms to efficiently connect information resources for various factors such as production, operation, and management, and promote the networking rate of digital production equipment of more than half of enterprises to reach more than 70%, and the average utilization rate of equipment capacity connected to the platform increased by 30%.
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, the flow of people in various places was restricted, and factories in many regions were facing a shortage of people and shutdown. However, Dongguan has benefited from the solid foundation laid by transformation and upgrading and innovation-driven development. With the city's industrial added value above the designated size in the first quarter of 2020, it quickly stopped falling and rebounded since April, demonstrating the strong resilience of Dongguan's manufacturing industry.
At the Dongguan Global Investment Promotion Conference held this year, Dongguan Municipal Party Secretary Xiao Yafei once said: "Manufacturing is the chassis of Dongguan, the true nature of Dongguan, and the resilience of Dongguan. We will build an advanced manufacturing industry cluster to make this business card brighter."
Dongguan Songshan Lake. Source: Innovation Songshan Lake WeChat official account
Full-chain innovation ecosystem
former director of the Dongguan Municipal Party History Research Office said when reviewing the development history of Dongguan, "Although Dongguan is not a special economic zone, it always consciously or unconsciously takes one step first, and if Dongguan wants to develop, it must take one step first."
Time goes back to 2001. At that time, Dongguan was already the third international manufacturing base in the country with exports, but while playing the trump card of manufacturing, Dongguan people who dared to be the first looked at a longer-term place. "Traditional manufacturing is driven by factors and is limited. If we want to continue to develop in Dongguan, we must rely on technological innovation to drive development. Only the height of technological innovation is not a ceiling." Liang Zhanhong, currently a member of the Party Working Committee and member of the Management Committee of Songshan Lake, is a native of Dongguan. When the initial construction of Songshan Lake , he could never have imagined how this reservoir surrounded by lychees would transform in 20 years.
At that time, Songshan Lake was also a large natural reservoir, located in the geographical center of Dongguan, with an open terrain and convenient transportation. At the Dongguan Municipal Government Meeting in July 2001, Songshan Lake was designated as a place to carry Dongguan's dream of taking off science and technology. In November of that year, with the approval of the Guangdong Provincial Government, " Dongguan Songshan Lake Science and Technology Industrial Park " was officially established.
htmlFor more than 120 years, Liang Zhanhong has witnessed the continuous improvement of Songshan Lake from scratch and the energy level.In 2010, Songshan Lake was successfully rated as a national high-tech zone, which put the development of Songshan Lake on the fast lane.
In 2012, Huawei , founded in Shenzhen, successively captured 1,900 acres of land in Songshan Lake with a total investment of 10 billion yuan. In 2014, the construction of Songshan Lake European Town was started as Huawei's headquarters in Dongguan. Huawei's move not only recognized Songshan Lake, but also attracted upstream and downstream related companies to come.
In the past ten years, Songshan Lake has gathered a number of leading enterprises in the information technology industry, including Huawei terminal , Huabei Electronics , Shengyi Technology , Pulian technology, Goer Intelligence, and further expand the electronic information industry that Dongguan is already good at. At present, Songshan Lake's new generation information technology industry has become a pillar industry with a scale of over 100 billion yuan, with 95 enterprises above the designated size, accounting for 91.6% of the total industrial output value of the park.
When talking about the experience of Songshan Lake enterprise development, Liang Zhanhong said that the word "aggregation" is inseparable."Introducing enterprises, we do not simply provide land and factory buildings, but create a full-chain development model for enterprises. For example, the information technology industry. We gather a relatively complete industrial chain from basic equipment, communication networks, R&D, platform, production, application management to application services, and open upstream and downstream enterprises to allow enterprises to gather and develop together."
In the same year when Huawei took the land, the China Spallation Neutron Source, which was breaking ground in the remote valley at the towering mountain, has not yet shown the whole picture. Only a few people truly realize the energy contained in this large scientific device. As China's first and fourth pulse-type spalling neutron source, the project not only ends the history of the Pearl River Delta region without a national large scientific device, but also like a huge magnet, attracting batches of scientific talents to Songshan Lake.
10 years later, along the Neutron Source Road, China Spallation Neutron Source, Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan), etc., have formed a global first-class innovation platform matrix, outlining the clear outline of Songshan Lake Science City.
Nowadays, China's Spallation Neutron Source Phase II and Southern Advanced Light Source will be located in Songshan Lake. The energy level of Songshan Lake is also constantly improving. In 2015, Songshan Lake was successfully shortlisted for the Pearl River Delta National Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone ; in 2020, Songshan Lake Science City was officially included in the Greater Bay Area Comprehensive National Science Center Pilot Launch Zone, becoming an important part of the national scientific and technological strategic force.
has gone from "park" to "city". In the past 10 years, the comprehensive ranking of Songshan Lake High-tech Zone in the country's high-tech zone has jumped from the highest ranking of 52 to 21; the number of key laboratories at the municipal level and above has increased from 19 to 68, and the number of engineering and technology research centers at the municipal level and above has increased from 9 to 141; the proportion of R&D investment in Songshan Lake High-tech Zone's GDP has increased from 3.93% to 15.28%; in 2021, it has 509 high-tech enterprises, more than 10 times that in 2012. At present, Songshan Lake has gradually been built into an innovative ecological system with all factors, full chains and full processes.
At the end of August this year, the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government issued the "Opinions on Supporting Dongguan to Accelerate High-Quality Development in the New Era to Build a Strong City in Science and Technology Innovation and Manufacturing", which directly "named" Songshan Lake in terms of strengthening source innovation capabilities, improving the system and mechanism for scientific and technological innovation and achievement transformation, and accelerating the agglomeration of high-end scientific and technological innovation talents. As the leader and engine of Dongguan's scientific and technological innovation, it not only carries Dongguan's science and technology dream, but also is an important innovation engine leading the future development of the Greater Bay Area.
Over the past ten years, Dongguan has always adhered to innovation-driven development. Dongguan has built a scientific and technological innovation system from source innovation to technological innovation and then to industrial application, forming an advanced manufacturing system consisting of 190,000 industrial enterprises, 11,000 industrial enterprises above designated size, 7,387 national high-tech enterprises, 154 specialized and innovative enterprises, 66 listed enterprises, 19 enterprises with over 10 billion yuan, and 3 enterprises with a total of 10 billion yuan.
Now, facing the major historical opportunity of the construction of "dual zones", Dongguan will continue to strive based on the new starting point of "double ten thousand". The Dongguan Municipal Party Congress at the beginning of this year proposed that in the future, Dongguan will continue to enhance the new advantages of scientific and technological innovation and advanced manufacturing, take scientific and technological innovation as the guide, accelerate the cultivation of emerging industries, and enhance core competitiveness. At the same time, we will adhere to the background and advantages of Dongguan's manufacturing development, absorb and utilize the high-end scientific and technological innovation, financial and humanistic resources of the Greater Bay Area, and deepen innovation collaboration, industrial cooperation and mutual integration with cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macao.
In the past ten years, Dongguan has taken the initiative to plan and seize opportunities, actively connected with the major strategies of the country and the province, and performed a drama of traditionally creating a transformation of the big market. In the future, advanced manufacturing and scientific and technological innovation will fly together in the land of Dongyi. Dongguan is more worth looking forward to.
