Hunan Daily, November 28 (All-Media Reporters Xie Zhuofang, Trainee Reporter Fu Shuo) — At the 2025 World Intelligent Manufacturing Conference held on November 27, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and five other departments announced China's first batch of Lighthouse-level Smart Factories, with 15 enterprises nationwide selected. Zoomlion was successfully selected for its "Zoomlion Excavator Shared Manufacturing Smart Factory" project, becoming the only enterprise in Hunan to make the list.

▲ Front-page report by Hunan Daily

Lighthouse-level Smart Factories represent the highest tier in China's tiered cultivation system for smart factories, representing the highest level of domestic intelligent manufacturing and its future direction of development. The first batch of selected factories covers multiple key fields including equipment manufacturing, raw materials, electronic information, and consumer goods.

The Zoomlion Excavator Shared Manufacturing Smart Factory is located in the Earthmoving Machinery Park of the Zoomlion Smart Industrial City in the Hunan Xiangjiang New Area of Changsha. Zeng Guang, General Manager of Zoomlion Zhongke Cloud Valley, introduced that the factory has achieved three "global firsts" — the first to realize full-process intelligent manufacturing across the six major core manufacturing stages of excavators; the first to achieve efficient shared mixed-flow production of more than 70 models of excavators; and the first to achieve cross-category collaborative shared linkage among four major product categories — excavators, cranes, concrete pump trucks, and aerial work vehicles — forming a new paradigm of construction machinery shared manufacturing characterized by "one driving three."

▲ Zoomlion Excavator Shared Manufacturing Smart Factory

Inside this smart factory, industrial robots are the main workforce, busy "each performing its own duties," from installing small bolts to flipping vehicle frames. "The application rate of artificial intelligence technology scenarios here exceeds 80%, with one excavator rolling off the line on average every 6 minutes. The three core indicators — production takt time, changeover time, and manufacturing cycle — are all the shortest in the global construction machinery field," Zeng Guang introduced. Practice shows that it takes only 6.5 days from steel plate blanking to the complete machine rolling off the line, meaning customized products can be delivered to domestic customers within as fast as two weeks.

With "zero-switch" changeover, self-organizing and self-optimizing production resources, and significantly improved efficiency through collaborative sharing, the factory has solved the world-class challenge of producing heavy equipment in the construction machinery industry characterized by "many varieties and small batches." Relying on the factory's shared R&D platform, shared production model, and shared collaboration system, an ecosystem network of "shared intelligent manufacturing" horizontally covers four major construction machinery categories and vertically connects hundreds of processes, achieving a steel plate material utilization rate exceeding 90% and reducing smart factory construction costs by 15%.

At present, the relevant technologies and models of this factory have formed more than 50 enterprise standards, participated in the formulation of 6 industry and national standards, and been replicated and promoted to more than 20 smart factories worldwide, empowering hundreds of enterprises in fields such as agricultural machinery, emergency equipment, and energy equipment, transforming the advantages of a single factory into development momentum for multiple industries.