Why robot makers want to bite into meat pie county
Print Edition
Less than 30 kilometers from Beijing, Xianghe County, in north China’s Hebei Province, is renowned for its cheap, delicious pies made of pork, beef or mutton, which have more than 200 years of history.
In the past four years, however, an utterly different industry has been taking shape in the meat pie county: robots.
A spate of high-end robot manufacturers have moved to Hebei to take advantage of the lower costs, including German company Nimak Welding (Beijing), following the regional integration in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei launched in 2014.
Sun Liang, with the company’s marketing department, said that it took only a few months for the company executives to decide to move to Xianghe.
In late 2016, his firm decided to relocate to a robot-making area in Xianghe for market expansion in the province.
Construction of the government-supported area began in 2014, and the government provides preferential policies for companies operating there, said Zhang Jinwu, a local official.
Nimak sold 1,000-plus robots with an output value of more than 200 million yuan (US$32 million) last year, “a very good start,” Sun said.
The company has more than 160 employees, of whom almost half are locals of Xianghe.
About 1,400 high-tech companies from Beijing and Tianjin have moved to Hebei since 2014. Last year, Hebei obtained 250 billion yuan of funding through the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regional cooperation mechanism.
“When people in China speak of Xianghe, they think of meat pies,” Sun said. “But from now on, robots will replace meat pies to speak for Xianghe.”
Beijing and Tianjin municipalities along with Hebei Province form one of China’s most economically developed regions. Over 100 million people inhabit the region with an area of 216,000 square kilometers.
Officials were urged to bear in mind coordination and integration when building the economic zone surrounding Beijing, and note the need for balancing development, the environment, population and resources.
In the past four years, several breakthroughs have been made in regional integration.
Diao Hongqi works for the Tianjin Tiantie Metallurgy Group Company in the mountain areas of Shexian County in Hebei.
The plant was built in 1969, when Diao was born. It currently employs more than 20,000 workers born in Tianjin.
Travel time slashed
The distance between Shexian County and Tianjin is about 550km. There used to be only two choices to travel between the two places: 13 hours by slow train, or seven hours by coach.
The rapid development of the transport network has changed all that. A high-speed train started running between Tianjin and Hebei’s Baoding in late 2015. This has cut Diao’s travel time to less than four hours.
Transport in the region is rapidly improving and world class airports are expected to make traveling even easier.
By 2030, major airports in the region will be effectively connected with railways to establish a strong and coordinated air transport system, according to a guideline released by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
“The future looks bright for the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region,” said He Yafei, with Renmin University of China. “The region has a high-tech talent pool, and the highly skilled people, coupled with rich resources, will unleash the huge potential here.”
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