The industrial internet – a new industrial and application ecology formed by deeply fusing next-generation ICT with the industrial economy – connects people, machines and objects and senses, transmits and computes industrial data in real time, enabling intelligent control, operational optimisation and new ways of organising production. Three experts discussed its development with Economic Daily.
5G-plus-industrial-internet leads the world
Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, traced the policy system: a State Council guidance document set the strategic direction, MIIT issued two three-year action plans plus documents on standards, networks, platforms, apps, security and identification resolution, and provinces from Beijing to Guangdong issued their own plans. Applications now span 28 national economic sectors from raw materials to consumer goods, extending into power, ports and logistics, with six typical modes – platform-based design, intelligent manufacturing, networked collaboration, personalised customisation, service extension and digital management.
Results are tangible: some pioneering firms lifted labour productivity over 20%, cut energy use per 10,000 yuan of industrial output by 6% or more, and reduced equipment failure rates by more than half. SMEs, weaker in informatisation, focus on two things: acquiring digital management capability, and joining socialised production systems through platforms to obtain the orders and capital they need.
The three functional systems advance together: high-quality external networks cover 300-plus cities connecting 180,000 industrial enterprises; five national top-level identification resolution nodes run with nearly 47 billion identifiers registered; over 100 platforms of industry and regional influence connect more than 70 million devices; and a national security situational awareness platform covers all 31 provinces and 112,000 enterprises. The industry’s direct scale reached RMB 968.9 billion in 2020, up 12.8%.
5G-plus-industrial-internet empowers, adds value and adds intelligence: it offers manufacturing brand-new digital infrastructure as a public service model, cutting build and operating costs; combined with edge computing, AI, AR/VR, network slicing and high-precision positioning it creates new application scenes – predictive maintenance, machine-vision quality inspection, remote assistance and virtual training; and by embedding communications and compute into industrial systems through new modules and chips, it may reshape industrial networks and spawn cloud robots, edge clouds and software-defined PLCs.
Platformisation is the defining feature
Zhou Jianqi of the Development Research Center of the State Council noted nearly 306,000 registered industrial internet and support-service enterprises, with 53,000 new registrations in January-August alone, up about 55.9% year on year – 18.7 points above the national average for new firms. Fusion with equipment, machinery, automotive, energy, metallurgy, petrochemicals and mining is changing production flows, enabling lean supply, deepening supply chain collaboration and spawning new modes such as the energy internet – and lowering total cost over the medium term.
Her prescriptions: cultivate platform companies in key traditional industries; build the digital-era industrial ecology on them; form industry innovation communities around platforms to attack core technology gaps; use platform governance for safety, carbon and quality; and provide supportive finance and talent policies.
The bottlenecks: foundation, adoption, innovation, talent
Qin Linlin of the China Center for Information Industry Development listed four weaknesses. Foundation: late industrialisation leaves thin experience, and the value chain is imbalanced – weak autonomy in high-end links like design software and industrial control, stronger in lower-end management software and integration. Adoption: supply-side players understand industry workflows too shallowly, and foreign firms lock up most head customers. Innovation: intellectual property protection lags – users run pirated foreign software, damping domestic R&D incentive. Talent: school-enterprise cooperation is loose, and internet-sector salaries siphon talent away.
His recommendations: concentrate resources on bottleneck fields such as industrial design software through major special projects, and shift support from generic commercialisation to high-tech patents; open the full industrial internet project cycle to digital technology firms in fast-iterating fields; use industry alliances to build ecosystems and standards in mature fields; and reform school curricula to produce versatile talent who understand both intelligent technology and industry.
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