An intelligent manufacturing and equipment exhibition begins on Thursday at the Guangzhou International Sourcing Center, as an important part of the ongoing 12th China International Small and Medium Enterprises Fair held in the provincial capital of Guangdong.

The four-day event focuses on intelligent equipment manufacturing, 3-D printing, electronic products, robots and online-to-offline manufacturing.

It is designed to provide a one-on-one business negotiation service for exhibitors and professional visitors.

The exhibition is in line with Guangdong's recent development and local businesses' demands for advanced, smart manufacturing.

"Small and medium-sized enterprises like us are eager to embrace the opportunities in the intelligent manufacturing sector and need the access to cooperate with our leading counterparts worldwide," said Gao Huiming, general manager of a Guangdong-based precision casting company.

Guangdong, a major manufacturing base both in China and globally, launched a 10-year plan on Aug 27, forecasting the overall development layout of the province's intelligent manufacturing sector.

By 2025, the province would nurture a batch of international companies that own core technologies and famous brands, and also build itself into one of China's intelligent manufacturing demonstration zones, with both global influence and competitiveness, according to the plan.

These days, traditional industries such as steel, chemicals and building materials are facing a slowdown in growth, and the rapid development of emerging industries such as new energy, new-generation information technology and intelligent robots is not enough to prevent the impact of the slowdown, said Mao Weiming, former deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

To meet the challenge, intelligent manufacturing, especially intelligent equipment manufacturing, will play a prominent role, he added.

Guangdong has advantages in developing intelligent manufacturing, thanks to its solid industrial base and structure, said Xie Shaofeng, a senior official at MIIT. However, the province also lags behind the world's advanced economies in innovation capacity, product quality and core technologies.

According to the 10-year plan, Guangdong will focus on making breakthroughs in fields such as intelligent sensors and instrumentation, core components, high-speed and high-precision manufacturing processes and embedded industrial chips.

Guangzhou is expected to become home to a manufacturing base for domestic leading robots, wearable devices and intelligent equipment, and Zhuhai to highlight research on smart grid devices and unmanned vessels.

The province would also establish a group of world-class national labs, engineering labs and engineering technology development centers in local universities and research institutions, and make them open to the public, the plan states.

The western Pearl River Delta region is forecast to be the largest contributor to the development of the province's manufacturing industry, as an advanced equipment manufacturing industrial cluster started construction in August 2014 in the region.

In the first half of this year, the added value of equipment manufacturing in the region reached nearly 108 billion yuan ($17 billion), up 9.6 percent over the same period last year.

haonan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 10/15/2015 page5)