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October 21, 2016

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Home » City specials » Ningbo

Ningbo Hangzhou Bay New Zone home to auto giants

By Chen Xian | October 21, 2016, Friday | Print Edition

NINGBO Hangzhou Bay New Zone is the fastest-growing economic development zone in Ningbo as the city pursues its “Made in China 2025” dreams.

The zone is working to attract talents to sustain its industrial development and boost growth in other sectors such as tourism and health care.

The new zone, allocated in the northeast area of Ningbo, enjoys key advantages including its proximity to Shanghai because of Hangzhou Bay Cross-sea Bridge. It is also just one-and-half-an-hour drive from Hangzhou.

“We contribute about 1 percent annually to the total economic growth of Ningbo. And we are working to become a smart and modern zone, combining both industrial development and good living conditions,” said Cai Shijie, vice deputy of Ningbo Hangzhou Bay New Zone Administration Committee.

Cai said the economic growth rate in the past nine months remained over 10 percent, while the economic aggregate in the zone doubled every three years since the zone was founded in 2010.

The zone is home to a host of large-scale of automobile parts manufacturers. In the future, it aims to produce hundreds of billions of yuan worth of automobiles and auto parts.

The automobile sector is now upgrading to smart manufacturing with digitalization and automation.

“We have a German Industry 4.0 version factory at the SAIC Volkswagen branch in the Ningbo Hangzhou Bay New Zone. The manufacturing system adopted in the factory is from Germany, featuring high-level automation of about 94 percent,” said Cai.

China’s Geely company has set up an automobile engine manufacturing and research institute in the zone. With the help of digitalization, the total output in the past seven months was four times that of the previous years.

“We can monitor and manage the production line simultaneously. There is an app platform in our factory that collects the data of each engines that ensures that the production capability reaches 99.9 percent,” said Zhao Fucheng, vice president of Geely Automobile Engine Research Institute.

The German modules-producing line has been employed at SAIC Volkswagen’s Ningbo Hangzhou Bay New Zone branch. It can produce four kinds of different modules of cars at the same time. High-level automation pressing lines are employed in the company which can produce 15 modules every minute — one of the fastest pressing lines in the world. Technological arms are equipped on the line to transfer modules automatically. It takes only 51 seconds to produce a qualified car body in the workshop.

The German technology has also been employed in a local company called Xingye Shengtai to produce high-precision steel alloy. The company spent 30 million yuan (US$4.45 million) to import the system from Germany. It can systematically manage the whole process from raw materials to final products. It needed five to six workers but now only employs one person.

“We spend annually 100 million yuan on technology and research,” said Yuan Hefeng, an engineer with Xingye Shengtai.

Citic Dicastal is one of the top 500 companies in the world that produces aluminium wheel parts for automobiles. It set up its subsidiary company in the Hangzhou Bay New Zone, called Ningbo Citic Discastal Wheel Manufacturing Co. The company has developed a water-cooling system that is used for wheel casting.

“We developed the system by ourselves. The rate of finished products has now reached 97 percent. The water-cooling system increases 40 percent productivity than the traditional wind-cooling method and the quality of products has also improved by 50 percent,” said Sun Yongze, chief of engineering department at the Ningbo Citic Discastal Wheel Manufacturing Co.

A local knitting enterprise Cixing Company invented a knitting robot to sew the sweaters precisely and automatically that cuts the sewing time by two thirds.

Ningbo


 

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