How to upgrade the steel industry

There is a problem that must be solved first in intelligent manufacturing of iron and steel industry in China, that is, how to integrate the traditional iron and steel industry into the trend of equipment manufacturing towards the middle and high-end level, so as to meet the increasing demand of equipment manufacturing for steel quality.

In the past decades, China's iron and steel industry has achieved rapid development, from the initial stage of reform and opening up with an annual output of tens of millions of tons of steel to more than 800 million tons now. Although the country advocates de-capacity now, in the future, the steel industry will still play an important role in the upgrading of the whole national economic structure, especially in the equipment manufacturing industry moving towards the middle and high-end level.

Regarding how to promote intelligent manufacturing in iron and steel enterprises, Forward-looking Industry Research Institute plans to do the following three things well:

First, the production mode of iron and steel enterprises should change from "mass manufacturing" to "mass customization". In the past, we mostly met the demand of quantity, because we mainly faced the demand of scale and homogenization from infrastructure industry and real estate industry, and the demand level of equipment manufacturing industry was not very high. Now, with the optimization and upgrading of China's national economic structure, especially the equipment manufacturing industry is moving towards the middle and high-end level, higher and higher requirements are put forward for steel materials in the middle. The era of personalized, quality and differentiated demand for steel materials has arrived.

Second, intelligent manufacturing should emphasize the innovation of enterprise system and business model, not the intelligent manufacturing technology itself. In the past, in order to meet the demand of large-scale homogenization, we must expand the equipment of iron and steel enterprises to improve production efficiency and reduce unit fixed costs. What about now? Facing the change of demand structure, we should make large enterprises "small" and realize "small and micro" operation.

Third, intelligent manufacturing should strengthen cross-border thinking. With the development of economy and technology, the boundaries between industries are becoming more and more blurred. For example, ThyssenKrupp Steel Company of Germany positioned itself as a provider of high-end metal materials and parts solutions and an elevator manufacturer, and extended the traditional steel manufacturing to a high-tech enterprise related to steel.