Home appliance industry automation era "tide" arrival

Since the beginning of this year, Industry 4.0 and Internet factories have become the topic of the home appliance industry. Taking advantage of the "Internet +" trend, some strong well-known home appliance companies have recently taken a step forward in the battlefield of manufacturing transformation and wisdom, hoping to take advantage of the "Made in China 2025" to seize the initiative in the industry reshuffle. However, the reporter also found in the interview that in addition to the above home appliance giants, Wanjiale, Wanhe, Kangbao, Galanz, Huadi, Soqi and other large and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in the Pearl River Delta are also eager to move, showing a strong interest in automated production equipment.

Three big white electric enterprises Qixiu robot

On August 11, Haier's "transparent factory" in Shenyang was officially unveiled, and through the "intelligent interactive manufacturing platform" created, the factory not only realized the automated production of robots, but also realized the real-time interconnection between users, products, machines and production lines. Coincidentally, two other home appliance giants, Midea and Gree, also entered the robot field at the same time last week.

On August 4, Gree Electric Appliances opened its automated production workshop for the first time, and publicized the latest progress of its self-developed robots. It is reported that Gree's current independent research and development of automation products have covered ten fields such as robots, injection molding robots, large automation line bodies, and nearly 100 kinds of products. On the same night, the United States released a robot strategy, the next three years will invest more than 1 billion yuan in robot applications, and announced the establishment of two joint ventures with Japan Yaskawa Electric, respectively, the development of industrial robots and service robots.

Home appliance industry automation factory -- Huaxi Seiko.jpeg

Rising labor costs accelerate the transformation

From the enterprise level, the implementation of robot automation production is not only in response to national strategies, but also for its own operational considerations. Liu Buchen, a veteran observer of the home appliance industry, said in an interview that home appliance giants choose to transition to automated production for the sake of reducing labor costs and enhancing corporate profitability. Home appliance enterprises after the implementation of robot automation, although the initial cost of investment is high, but in the next few years the cost of maintenance is very low, production efficiency can be greatly improved, more importantly, the production can achieve complete standardization, greatly improve the quality of products, which determines the future of Chinese enterprises will use a large number of robots for production.

In fact, with the gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend, human costs have become the biggest weakness of traditional manufacturing industry, while the rise of human costs, the problem of recruitment difficulties also troubled the United States, Gree and other traditional home appliance enterprises.

The industry is facing a new round of reshuffle

Whether it is Haier's "transparent factory" to achieve user customization, or Gree's "product precision requirements" or Midea's "double wisdom" strategy (smart home + intelligent manufacturing). On the one hand, automated production is preparing for intelligent manufacturing, and on the other hand, it is to complete the intelligence of the overall household appliances. Some insiders said that traditional home appliance manufacturing enterprises can generally achieve intelligence on a single product, but the overall interconnection is not completed, and to achieve the intelligence of the overall home appliance, its core parts have very high precision requirements, and these links need to be robotized to complete.

In fact, the use of automation equipment or robots, are long product lines, huge demand for big brands, which is undoubtedly far-reaching for a large number of second and third-line home appliance brands, Liu Buchen believes that after the implementation of automated production, product prices are reduced, resulting in the future of second and third-line brands more and more sad. At present, the home appliance industry is the fastest intelligent industry, so this reshuffle will take the lead in the home appliance industry.