On June 25, Caixin Global reported that the 15th Dalian Davos Forum was held in Dalian, focused on the theme of "New Frontiers of Future Growth". In an interview with Caixin Global, Chai Xiaozhou, Vice President of Honeywell Smart Industrial Technology Group and General Manager of China, said that green innovation is an important growth point for intelligent manufacturing.

Caixin Global: The theme of this year's summer Davos is "New Frontiers of Future Growth." In your opinion, what role does intelligent manufacturing play in the new frontiers of future growth? What are the new frontiers of intelligent manufacturing?

Chai Xiaozhou: New quality of production, industrial upgrading and transformation, and high-quality development are all related to intelligent manufacturing. With the intelligent development of the entire manufacturing industry, Honeywell focuses on three major development trends: automation, future aviation, and energy transformation, and has reorganized its four business sectors. Among them, green innovation is an important growth point.

Approximately 60% of Honeywell's innovative research and development start with improving customer environmental and social performance. At the same time, the company's manufacturing operations are also low-carbon and sustainable, with four of its more than 20 factories in China being national or provincial green factories.

China aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, and Honeywell has committed to achieving carbon neutrality in all business operations and facilities by 2035. In order to achieve this goal, we began related work very early, and many of the company's technologies are related to energy transformation, such as sustainable aviation fuel, waste plastic recycling, carbon capture, utilization and storage technology, etc.

Caixin Global: With the continued popularity of AI, has there been any revolutionary breakthrough or highlight in intelligent manufacturing recent years?

Chai Xiaozhou: With the strong advantage and rich experience accumulation based on automation technology, Honeywell is also actively applying these emerging technologies. In terms of industrial process control management, we use AI and other new technologies to help customers improve efficiency in energy utilization, operation management, and production manufacturing, and achieve sustainable development and digital transformation goals.

For employee training, some positions require rich experience accumulation, and AI helps to digitize these experiences, allowing newly recruited university students to be competent for such positions. Honeywell uses a variety of similar technologies to help customers train new employees more effectively, carry out industrial process processing and control more effectively, and achieve efficiency improvement and cost reduction.

For Honeywell itself, we use digitization to solidify our management concept. Taking the Suzhou factory as an example, we have basically achieved paperlessness through automation transformation.

Caixin Global: What is the distribution of internal and external capital enterprises of upstream and downstream industry chain partners mainly served by Honeywell Smart Industry in China?

Chai Xiaozhou: Different service areas have different partners. From the perspective of raw materials, we pay more attention to local suppliers, which helps ensure the stable operation of the enterprise's supply chain.

For example, a few years ago, when there was a shortage of chips, we supported a large number of local chip companies. In the past, such companies were difficult to enter the demanding industrial field, but at the time, the international chip factory had long delivery times and inadequate capacity. Therefore, we chose to cooperate with some domestic enterprises to improve their capabilities while also solving our own chip shortage problem, which allowed the company to continue to stably supply the Chinese market under extremely difficult external conditions.

Caixin Global: What is the main strategic direction for the future?

Chai Xiaozhou: Honeywell has always advocated the concept of "serving the east with the east." In addition to production and sales, we began building local R&D teams very early. Now, our Smart Industry Technology Group has more than 500 full-time R&D personnel in China. The company's local investment has also achieved good results, such as the current current sensors used in new energy electric vehicles, which are independently developed by local teams and produced in Nanjing. In this field, we occupy a leading position in the industry, and most of the mainstream domestic electric vehicles use our products. In addition, with the strengthening of China's new energy electric vehicles, these products can further serve overseas markets.