Robot Industry Leader Li Zexiang Talks about How Changsha Seizes Intelligent Manufacturing Opportunities

There are many opportunities for intelligent manufacturing. The key is to seize high-end equipment and future intelligent systems, develop in an ecological model, and benefit the entire industry chain with a base model. Recently, Li Zexiang, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a leader in the robotics industry, talked freely about the views of intelligent manufacturing leading the industrial transformation at the special roadshow of the transformation of scientific and technological achievements in Zhihui Xiangjiang Kechuang New District and the rainbow high-end intelligent equipment in the new district held in Xiangjiang Fund Town.

Intelligent manufacturing is the main direction of China's manufacturing 2025, and it is an important path to realize China's manufacturing industry from big to strong. In recent years, Changsha City has built a strong manufacturing province around the implementation of China's manufacturing 2025, made every effort to build a national intelligent manufacturing center, and formed a Changsha model for promoting intelligent manufacturing, which has been fully affirmed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

As a native of Hunan, Li Zexiang is best known for incubating the DJI innovative drone company worth more than $10 billion, and his role is not only an early investor, but also a teacher of DJI founder and CEO Wang Tao. As a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Li Zexiang continues to practice a unique entrepreneurial incubation path.

While expressing a bright vision for the prospects of the high-end intelligent manufacturing industry, Li Zexiang emphasized that for Changsha, the most important thing to achieve a breakthrough is talent. How to cultivate talents for future industries? Of course, it is to create an incubation and an entrepreneurial platform for them, that is, an ecological system.

Li Zexiang believes that in the future, artificial intelligence technology will further promote the deep integration of related technologies, emerging technologies and emerging industries, promote a new round of information technology revolution, and become a new fulcrum for the transformation and upgrading of my country's economic structure.

When intelligent manufacturing reshapes the industrial chain, how should Changsha stand in the wind and soar? Li Zexiang gives the answer.

Where are the smart manufacturing opportunities?

Seize the equipment, industrial robots, chips three industries!

Li Zexiang analyzed that in the past 40 years, China's manufacturing industry has been almost blank. It has developed rapidly to occupy 82 trillion yuan, accounting for 30% of GDP, and has become the core industry to increase GDP. In terms of quantity, China's manufacturing industry accounts for more than 25% of the world's total. We can see that quantity is no longer a problem, the key is quality. This is also the most important starting point for China's manufacturing industry in the next 10 years. Li Zexiang said.

As of 2017, China's total GDP was $11.2 trillion and the U.S. GDP was $18.57 trillion. Li Zexiang believes that if we can maintain a growth rate 4 points higher than that of the United States, and at the same time focus on the real economy, especially the manufacturing industry, my country's total GDP will form a key intersection with the United States in 10 years. Become the world's largest economy.

Li Zexiang believes that to become the world's largest economy, we must firmly grasp the three core industries, namely the equipment industry, industrial robots, and chip industry.

With the development of industrial 4.0 and intelligent manufacturing, the importance of equipment manufacturing industry is becoming more and more important. If it only occupies 20% of the manufacturing industry, GDP will be 1.2 trillion US dollars in added value. If the high-end equipment manufacturing industry can increase to 30% capacity, it will also form a market of 2.4 trillion yuan! Li Zexiang said that the equipment industry covers core functional components, high-end CNC machine tools, industrial robots, electronic packaging and manufacturing equipment and other subdivisions. As long as we start from these subdivisions, there are huge opportunities in each field, and its added value is at least 10 trillion yuan.

Li Zexiang lamented that every small part may be a huge industry. Although the encoder, reducer, guide rail these components look inconspicuous, but the domestic high-end equipment to rely on imports. Secondly, in the high-end machine tool industry, the industry's top technology is still from Japan, Germany, Switzerland, the domestic temporarily unable to capture these mountains. This one ceiling after another is also our opportunity. As long as we can conquer it, the domestic market capacity will far exceed the sum of the United States, Japan, Germany and other countries.

When it comes to the industrial robot industry, Li Zexiang is the leader of the industry.

Li Qun Automation, a robot company founded by his students Shi Jinbo and Yu Chunhua, completed round B of investment of tens of millions of dollars in April 2016, with annual sales exceeding 20 million yuan. Reporters learned that Li Qun Automation was founded in 2011 and focuses on small lightweight and high-performance industrial robots. It has now launched a number of products including Apollo series parallel robots, Artemis series and Athena series SCARA robots. It is a well-known start-up project in the field of small lightweight industrial robots. In 2013, Li Qun launched the world's first all-in-one parallel robot, leading the industry for 4 years. In 2017, Liequn Automation has reached an annual output of 120000 robots. Li Zexiang said that although this figure is insignificant compared with the size of the Chinese market, he predicts that Li Qun's automated robots will have 10 times the growth space in the future, and it will become very simple to achieve an annual output of 1 million units in the future.

Speaking of the chip industry, Li Zexiang analyzed that the global chip industry reaches 400 billion yuan every year, and China consumes nearly 60%. The equipment needed for chip manufacturing is an important treasure, and China has great opportunities in the field of chip production equipment for back-end repackaging, testing, leading and other functional devices.

For China's high-end manufacturing industry, Li Zexiang is very confident. He firmly believes that when we master core technologies such as intelligent equipment, artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning, the manufacturing model and business model of the entire manufacturing industry will undergo earth-shaking changes, and smart factories, smart workshops and customer customization will be commonplace. phenomenon.

Extended development of terminal areas

Industrial robots have great potential

With the application of the Internet, everyone has a smart phone. Many people think that the terminal market has been filled and there is no chance. Where will the next big application market emerge and in what form?

Li Zexiang believes that the answer is robots. Various forms of robots, including robots for various solutions such as drones, autonomous driving, intelligent engineering machinery, and smart homes. And the form of these products will no longer be a single variety, but a variety can reach hundreds of thousands, millions or even trillions of yuan in output value.

In Li Zexiang's view, intelligent manufacturing has three levels. The first is the future era of smart chips and smart sensors connected to the Internet of Things and big data, the second is the era of smart equipment and smart manufacturing, and the third is the era of artificial intelligence. The markets at these three levels are very huge. When these fields are integrated and crossed with life sciences, they will produce product forms that we have never seen before. Including intelligent terminals for the consumer market, intelligent transportation and intelligent logistics systems for logistics and transportation, intelligent agriculture and intelligent environmental protection for agriculture and environmental protection, it can also profoundly affect sports, families, urban communities, medical care, education and other fields, these revolutions and impacts will be subversive!

Li Zexiang recalled that Yidong Technology, founded by his student Pan Zongliang, built a water Tesla by linking the engine with water sports. The products have been successfully promoted to developed regions such as Europe, America, Australia, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and have received 10 million-level A- round financing from Clear Water Bay Fund and Sequoia Capital.

Another project led by Li Zexiang, Changsha Intelligent Driving Research Institute (CIDI), is dedicated to artificial intelligence technology-oriented, focusing on the research and development of intelligent driving vehicle technology and products, and the application and promotion of logistics express vehicles. Focusing on the core technology of intelligent driving, the company develops derivative products of intelligent transportation, automatic unloading, new energy and intelligent manufacturing from the perspective of the whole industry chain.

When the container is intelligent, our logistics cost will be greatly reduced. Not only by land, we will also push intelligence to the maritime and aviation fields. Li Zexiang introduced.

Create an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Let talents create industrial value!

Over the years, after Gugao, DJI and Li Qun Automation, Li Zexiang wants to systematically summarize the problems encountered in the development of various companies, what they have learned, and the road they have taken, hoping to provide a platform for more young people to start their own businesses. Take detours and pay less tuition.

I often say that there are many opportunities in the intelligent manufacturing industry, but the most important thing is to need talents to promote the development of this industry. Li Zexiang said that the Robotics College of Hunan University and the Changsha Robotics Research Institute are both incubation platforms for the intelligent manufacturing industry in Changsha.

In 2016, with the support of Changsha municipal government, Li Zexiang returned to Hunan to build the incubation platform of Changsha Robot Research Institute.

The Robotics College of Hunan University is the talent training and reserve plan that Li Zexiang began to plan before the establishment of the Changsha Intelligent Robotics Research Institute, which aims to promote the development of intelligent manufacturing and equipment industries in Changsha and surrounding areas. With the strong support of the president of Huda University, the teachers of the colleges involved in the construction of the Robotics College have discussed with Li Zexiang for more than a year, and learned from the experience and resources of famous foreign schools to sort out a new talent training curriculum system, and in September 2017 Recruit the first batch of students.

As early as when he was working at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Li Zexiang explored some new courses to make the students who could only take exams and write papers able to develop new products and open up new markets. With these courses, a group of entrepreneurs have been trained and a company with national and international influence has been created.

It is worth mentioning that these start-ups under the guidance or leadership of Li Zexiang have formed interaction, creating a small ecosystem. The core components of Gurun, Li Qun's equipment, Dajiang's terminals and Yidong's terminals are all complementary and coordinated.

Shenzhen has the most complete manufacturing industry chain in the world. When we are based in Shenzhen, we combine the exploration of educating and cultivating talents with Shenzhen's industries. In Changsha's Intelligent Manufacturing Research Institute and Huda Robotics College, we are also building such an ecology step by step. Li Zexiang introduced.

In recent years, in order to help more young people realize their dreams, Li Zexiang has built a robot industry base and an incubator. Many young people have been attracted from Hong Kong, from the mainland and from all over the world. Li Zexiang said that as long as they have ideas, we will sort out his ideas and provide him with support for various parts, talents, industrial chains, angel funds, and entrepreneurial counseling to help him go on step by step. Realize his dream.

The road to entrepreneurship is very difficult. The success rate of entrepreneurship is very small. It is worth mentioning that in the past few years, I have absorbed nearly 40 teams, and 80% or even 85% of the teams have been able to pass smoothly, thanks to our entrepreneurial support system. Li Zexiang said that in the past three years, with the help of this support system, he has cultivated a number of entrepreneurial teams in Songshan Lake base, such as consumer robots, intelligent systems, sports, rehabilitation, industry, and so on.

Li Zexiang's students said that on the way to help students start their own businesses, whether it is the supply chain, capital, or the later channels and the deployment of technical talents, Li Zexiang has devoted a lot of effort. He also often calls for: There are a lot of companies investing now, but there are very few funds investing in high-tech industries in the early stage. I hope that the big angel investments and funds can be more patient and support the development of small companies and teams in intelligent manufacturing for a longer period of time.