Small Home Appliances Factory Upgrade and Transformation

Industry 4.0 special small home appliances business articles

The State Council issued the “Made in China 2025” strategic plan and proposed major strategic tasks and major measures to accelerate the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industries and increase efficiency. Leading manufacturers, especially home appliance manufacturers, have already launched "innovation" projects, such as the U.S. air-conditioned unmanned workshop and Haier's black-light shop. However, the small home appliance foundry companies hiding behind the figure of the leading companies are slightly embarrassed.

Recently, the Emmett Group, a small electrical appliance foundry, made its debut on the 2 millionth electric fan at the Jiujiang production base in Jiangxi Province. Although the base was regarded as its "innovation" experimental field, it was actually restricted by practical problems such as cost-effectiveness and there was still a gap between it and real industrial automation. "For small household appliances companies, the semi-automation can only be semi-automated." Vice-chairman Cai Zhengfu of Amy Electronics (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. admitted. In fact, it is not just the “smart creation” transformation of the small home appliance foundry companies, but also the transformation of the market. After losing the OEM cost advantage overseas, the move to the domestic market to develop its own brand has become another way out, but it must be faced with brand recognition and the squeeze of peer prices.

Can not avoid the cost of abacus

In order to improve production efficiency, Emmett's production department cooperates with the R&D department to customize the production line's upgrade plan. In Jiujiang Company, after upgrading the motor processing line and network production line in the core manufacturing process on the electric fan production line, the artificial demand for each motor processing line was reduced from 50 to 10, and each system production line was also From the original manual transformation of 100 people to automation, the number of artificial labor required in the future will be reduced to 20 people. Amy Electric (Jiujiang) Co., Ltd. General Manager Zhang Wanquan revealed to Southern reporter that the reconstruction cost a total of 8 million yuan.

However, compared with home appliance giants who are currently investing billions in industrial fully automated transformations, in the industry's view, this move is at best only from the industrial 2.0 phase to industry 3.0, and there is still a long way to go from 4.0. And there is a big mountain in the middle: cost-effectiveness. Cai Zhengfu admitted to Nandu reporters that small household electrical appliances production is not a highly specialized and complicated production process. Plus, the current labor cost in the Chinese market is not high. Even if the government strongly advocates industrial 4.0, it is not necessary to make great efforts. To buy and develop expensive robots. Because in Cai Zhengfu's account book, the traditional enterprise automation still needs to consider the cost finally. For example, 12 people may need 500,000-600,000 units of equipment. If you can lose 10 people, and now one person has almost 4000-5000 dollars, then this is a good deal. However, if the entire automated production is achieved, a professional company needs to be hired from Germany, and the entire production line may only need to invest 200 million U.S. dollars, so pure automation is not worthwhile. “Our small-scale production line has high automation and automation efficiency, so the automation part can't be very expensive. To pursue this kind of extreme, we must also consider the cost.”

Zhang Yanbin, Dean of Auvey Cloud Network Research Institute, interviewed by Southern Reporter pointed out that although labor costs are still under control, one day, China will enter the stage of high labor costs in Germany and other European and American countries. So urgent, but the trend. In addition, the life cycle of small household appliances is relatively long, and a set of industrial intelligent equipment can be used for a long time. Although the initial investment is large, the later funds can be recovered.

However, a realistic issue cannot be avoided. "Intelligent assembly line equipment is generally at the level of a million or ten million yuan, and many small and medium-sized enterprises can't afford it." Wang Liping, chairman of Hefei's technology manufacturing industrial intelligent equipment, revealed to Southern reporters.

The “intellectual-made” transformation is bound to “burn money”, where does the money come from? In fact, due to the low return on investment and the lack of attractiveness to capital, the difficulty of financing for manufacturing companies in China has become a universal problem, even if the annual income is broken. The 100 billion-dollar TCL Group is also facing difficulties in financing. Li Dongsheng, chairman of the TCL Group, once revealed to reporters from Nandu that in order to raise 6 billion yuan of funds, they “have made a lot of effort in feeding their children, and they have made numerous visits to their homes.” In the end, they only absorbed RMB 5.7 billion.

How to break the vicious circle?

If there is no capital for the transformation of intellectual creation, the increase in production efficiency will be slow, resulting in a low rate of return on investment and thus affecting financing. Obviously, this is a vicious cycle. However, the bigger problem is that due to the impact of the global economic downturn, exchange rate fluctuations and rising labor costs in China, if the increase in production efficiency underperforms the “global market,” Chinese foundries will gradually lose their cost advantage in the international market. . Cai Zhengfu said that it is now increasingly difficult to export. The Japanese market was affected by the exchange rate. The appreciation of the renminbi led to a significant increase in export costs. Fewer and fewer Japanese companies are willing to purchase Chinese foundry products. The European and American markets have been depressing the production cost of OEMs in recent years. It has been difficult for domestic OEMs to achieve the low prices that European and American brands want. Southern Reporter noted that in 2014, Emmett’s foreign sales revenue was 10.4 billion TWD, which was a 9.17% year-on-year decline.

To survive, you must make changes. In fact, as early as 1994, Emmett set up a domestic sales department, and began to gradually shift to the domestic market in 1997. The Jiujiang base that was put into operation in October last year is also a sign that it has officially returned its focus to the domestic market. Compared with the old factory in Shenzhen, the distance between Jiujiang and the country is shorter. The delivery time can be shortened from two to three days to one day, and the cost of logistics can be saved by 20 million yuan per year. However, domestic small household appliances market has a very high degree of saturation, and the road to own domestic markets with its own brands is not an easy one. Emmett’s domestic sales revenue surged by 22.38% year-on-year in 2013, but it declined by 2.52% year-on-year in 2014. However, Emmett has confidence in the growth of the domestic market. “Whether it is the Red Sea or the Blue Ocean, the products are the most important. Now the biggest advantage of Emmett is the quality of products and the reputation of consumers. It is our strength to do a good job of manufacturing. "Tsai Zhengfu said.