Fast-growing sectors driving supply chain innovation

CHANGSHA — Inside a factory in Central China's Hunan province, copper is inspected with micrometer-level precision before being wound into coils. The finished electromagnetic wire is rarely visible to consumers, yet it is an indispensable component in the electric motors that power new energy vehicles.

As electric vehicles become faster, more compact and capable of charging at higher voltages, upstream suppliers are being pushed to develop thinner insulation, more precise conductors and increasingly automated production lines.

One such supplier, Goldcup Electric Magnet Wire in Xiangtan began developing electromagnetic wire for NEV drive motors in 2015. Its shipments, driven by the rising demand for electric vehicles, grew 50 percent year-on-year to reach around 17,000 metric tons in 2025.

Zhou Weibin, assistant to the company's general manager, told Xinhua that rising performance requirements had prompted the company to shift from conventional round wire to flat wire, allowing more copper to fit inside a motor. This helps manufacturers reduce the motor size while meeting the higher power and voltage requirements of modern vehicle platforms.

The change reflects a broader trend in the country's industrial landscape, where demand from fast-growing industries is driving innovation further up the supply chain.

In neighboring Hubei province, engineers have developed copper foil just 3 micrometers thick — roughly one twenty-fifth the diameter of a human hair. Currently in mass production, the ultra-thin foil reduces copper use and enhances EV battery performance.

Such increasingly sophisticated components have helped raise the competitiveness of NEVs, which accounted for more than 60 percent of China's monthly new-car sales for the first time in July. Their cumulative share during the first seven months of the year also exceeded 50 percent, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

The shift toward advanced manufacturing reflects a national strategy to transform Central China — comprising Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei and Hunan provinces — into a key manufacturing hub linking coastal innovation centers with markets in western China.

Anhui, once strongly associated with agriculture, has emerged as a major automobile and NEV manufacturing base. In the first 11 months of 2025, the province produced about 3.34 million vehicles, including 1.64 million NEVs, making it China's leading vehicle-producing province during that period.

Beyond the EV supply chain, manufacturers are applying capabilities developed for established products to new ones.

In Liuyang, Hunan, Lens Technology initially built its manufacturing strength around precision glass components. It later expanded into smart-device assembly and automotive components, and more recently into artificial intelligence hardware and robotics.

At its facilities, rows of humanoid and quadruped robots show how production capabilities developed for one generation of products are being adapted for another.

Sun Yulei, CEO of the company, said its entry into embodied-intelligence hardware did not begin on an empty factory floor.

"We already have many years of accumulated experience, including experience in industrial robots and the group's capabilities in materials, modules and large-scale manufacturing," Sun said.

The company had previously developed industrial robots and automated production equipment to meet the needs of its own factories. Technologies involving joints, motion control and automated guided vehicle platforms could subsequently be adapted to new categories of robots, Sun said.

That accumulated know-how matters because building a robot that can walk or perform a demonstration is very different from creating a product that can be manufactured consistently, delivered at scale and maintained at an acceptable cost.

Some robots are now being tested in the company's own factories, providing engineers with real-world application scenarios and operational data.

"For relatively simple tasks in specific scenarios, a closed loop can be formed," Sun said. "But complex environments, particularly homes where every setting and required action is different, will still require a long period of development before fully autonomous operation becomes possible."

For humanoid robots, however, finding real-world applications remains a challenge.

"The biggest difficulty for humanoid robots is finding profitable applications and real-world scenarios," said Xiao Xiang, chief economist of the Liuyang municipal bureau of industry and information technology. "The company has its own application scenarios, so it can use them to iterate its robots and advance the technology."

XINHUA