Wuhu, a city in eastern China’s Anhui Province, has set ambitions targets to become a robot hub with an annual output of 50 billion yuan (US$7.13 billion) by 2025, a top official said recently.
Ningbo, deputy Party boss and mayor of Wuhu, delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 13th China International Robot Summit on May 17.
“By 2025, Wuhu aims to attract 150 robotic companies of certain size to put down roots in the city,” Ning told the audience.
In China’s industrial terminology, companies of certain size denote those with an annual revenue of 20 million yuan and above.
The summit is also where the 9th Capek Awards ceremony took place. Named after the Czech sci-fi writer Karel Čapek, this award is considered a top honor for robot industry practitioners and even likened to the “Nobel Prize” of Chinese robotics.
In his speech, Ning said “going forward, we will continue to empower smart equipment manufacturing like robotics through constructing a platform and ecosystem, industrial IoT and AI.”
After ten years of development, Wuhu already counts 220 robot-related companies with a combined revenue in excess of 30 billion yuan a year.
Among them, about 100 firms generated an output of 20 million yuan and more a year. The city’s robot industry also boasts 98 high-tech enterprises and produced three public firms.
Chinese cities are in a race to tap into new growth engines such as smart manufacturing and robotics to fuel their development.
