Directly hit Hannover: The number of Chinese exhibitors is 12 times that of the United States and 20 times that of Japan

Wu Xiaobo Channel

2024-04-24 09:00Posted on the official account of Zhejiang Hangzhou Bajiuling Cultural and Creative Co., Ltd

"In terms of the number of exhibitors, China ranks second with 1,220, accounting for 31%, which is 12 times that of the United States, 20 times that of Japan, and 14 times that of India. ”

Text / Ba Jiuling 

In the universe, there are six languages that can represent the human race, namely Chinese, French, Russian, English, Arabic, and Spanish; in a universe called "manufacturing", only Chinese, English, and German are left, which are essentially the three official languages, allowing a large number of industrial products to travel unhindered in the "global village" and spreading the civilization of the industrial and information age.

Since 1947, the Hannover Messe in April has been the biggest event in the "Manufacturing Universe". There, whether it is the official commentary of the "special exhibition" or business consultation and cooperation, it is basically monopolized by these three languages.

This year is the 76th Hannover Messe, and after seven years, Mr. Wu Xiaobo once again led the delegation to revisit Hannover. The team is composed of more than 110 entrepreneurs, and it is understood that the number of visitors is the largest among entrepreneurs from all over the world.

The theme of this year's exhibition is "Injecting Vitality into Sustainable Industrial Development", focusing on Industry 4.0, new energy, artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, 5G and other fields.

Sustainable energy and zero-emission energy are in the spotlight, and hydrogen energy exhibitors, who have been left out in the cold in previous editions of the fair, are now in the "C position" - about 4,000 companies from 60 countries/regions participated in this year's exhibition, four of which are related to new energy, and a total of about 500 exhibitors.

As the host, Germany sent a total of 1,333 exhibitors, accounting for 33.8%, ranking first. Famous companies such as Siemens, Bosch, SAP, Phoenix and Beckhoff are not absent, and these companies occupy the prime location of the exhibition hall, with large booths, innovative designs and a natural flow of people.

Chinese companies are also one of the protagonists of this year's Hannover Messe. In terms of the number of exhibitors, China ranked second with 1,220 exhibitors, accounting for 31%, and Germany is behind - this data is 12 times that of the United States, 20 times that of Japan, and 14 times that of India.

Some Chinese companies related to high-end industries, such as hydrogen fuel cells, robots, high-end automation equipment, energy solution systems, artificial intelligence, etc., also appeared at the exhibition. Regrettably, some of the leading companies seem to be absent.

The students at the scene told the minibus that many Chinese enterprises that mainly focus on industrial support are basically distributed in the four corners of German pioneer enterprises, forming a trend of "encirclement", which also objectively reflects the dependence of large German enterprises on China's supply chain.

At the scene, Mr. Wu and the entrepreneurs participated in a process-based "special exhibition": the organizer provided each team with a trilingual explanation in Chinese, English and German, similar to an industrial tour guide, with a fixed explanation route and fixed explanation content, to introduce the innovation of large enterprises to the entrepreneurs.

The entrepreneurs were impressed by Siemens, who designed several different themes, and ended with a virtual brewery, which then explained how the brewery uses a highly intelligent way to complete the entire process from hop cultivation to final beer production;

SAP will show you how Krones, the hidden champion of the beverage canning line industry, is managing production organization, operations, logistics and sales more intelligently with the help of its own systems.

In fact, the Hannover Messe is also a microcosm of Sino-German relations.

In 2016, after the Hannover Messe closed, Germany invested in more than 1,700 companies in China that year, and technology deals between China and Germany more than doubled. That year, the Hannover Messe became a mirror that reflected the best period in the history of Sino-German relations.

Just a week before the opening of this year, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid a three-day visit to China. More figuratively, the chancellor is like an "accompaniment" of executives from large companies - in the entourage list, BMW, Siemens, BASF, Bayer and other German industrial benchmark companies are impressively listed.

The data also shows the effectiveness of Sino-German cooperation. For the whole of 2023, German direct investment in China reached a record 4.3% year-on-year of 11.9 billion euros, and the proportion of investment in China in total German overseas investment was 10.3%, the highest level in a decade.

But the process has been quite tortuous. In the past eight years, there has been a new competition and cooperation relationship between China, Germany, and even the global industry, and the Sino-German relationship has undergone subtle changes.

This change was also reflected "consciously or unconsciously" at the Hannover Messe. In 2020, due to the epidemic, the exhibition was suspended for the first time, in 2021 it was changed to an online exhibition, in 2022, the offline exhibition resumed, but the exhibitors were less than 2/3 of 2019, and in 2023, it will be halfway back.

According to the observation of the mentor of the team, this year, although each exhibition hall seems to be lively, only about 60% of the exhibition halls are actually open.

In 2016, Mr. Wu went to Hannover for the first time with more than 150 entrepreneurs, and in 2017, the number of entrepreneurs in the group increased to 226 - and at the same time, he also witnessed the transformation of industrial intelligence:

◎ In 2016, a beverage production line at the Siemens booth, with sensors and printers, can complete the personalized customization of beverage packaging, allowing us to see what "flexible production" is;

◎ In 2017, an exhibition hall like a cloud appeared at the fair. This is the first time that Amazon Cloud has participated in an industry fair. For the first time, the delegation witnessed "cloud warehousing";

◎ In 2023, as ChatGPT becomes popular all over the world, Microsoft's booth will appear for the first time a project between OpenAI and Siemens, which makes us full of imagination about the future application of generative AI to industrial production.

In this year's exhibition, there are four leading mentors, including Mr. Wu, let's listen to their on-site feelings about this exhibition, as well as exclusive insights on intelligent manufacturing and industry 4.0

Wu Xiaobo

■ Financial Writer

After seven years, I visited Hannover for the third time, and in general I had three feelings:

▶ ▷ First, in terms of the number of exhibitors, Germany and China are the two protagonists of this Hannover Messe. The position of Made in China in global manufacturing is still very important. This year is the eleventh year of the birth of Industry 4.0, and China has not been left behind, at least in the field of intelligent manufacturing.

I also encountered a particularly interesting thing during my visit to the exhibition. There is a Turkish company that does photovoltaics, and I asked the exhibitors: "Who is more advanced in photovoltaic technology in Turkey compared to China?" The Turk laughed when he heard this, he said: "These photovoltaic products are all from China, and our company is just doing integration." ”

▶ ▷ The second point is that almost every company and every exhibition hall is related to artificial intelligence.

When I came to Hannover in the past, the most talked about was sensors, cloud services, robots, human-robot collaboration, and flexible production, but today these topics are still there, but with a key word: what exactly are these technologies related to generative AI, and how can they be combined?

I went to visit the exhibition hall of SAP, a well-known software service company in Germany, and I was greeted by Dr. Peng, whom I had met in 2017. He showed me how SAP was transforming a hidden champion in the production of beverage equipment in Germany – from process reengineering and manufacturing services to delivery, transforming the entire hardware and software collaboration system.

He also told me: "Today we are talking about every detail, every module, how to integrate it with generative AI. He said that the real revolution will take place in the next 12 to 18 months. The flexible and intelligent workshop that has been initially realized will have the next revolution with the production line.

▶ ▷The third point is another high-frequency word - sustainable development.

Every company I visited, every introducer would talk to me about how they thought about carbon neutrality, carbon peaking, and sustainable development. In a smart factory exhibition area attended by many companies, an engineer from Huawei told me: "Not long ago, the European Union introduced some mandatory regulations. Regulations require that between 2027 and 2030, all electronic flagship products exported to Europe must have a "carbon identity card". ”

For example, a battery, you can get the "ID card" of this battery by scanning the QR code on the battery through your mobile phone. This ID card can tell you how much carbon dioxide and carbon resources are consumed in the production process of this battery, whether zero-carbon production has been achieved, and how many carbon resources are consumed in the use of the battery, and whether carbon neutrality has been achieved in the whole life cycle?

On the one hand, this "carbon ID card" forces all Chinese manufacturing companies entering the EU to rethink the relationship between ESG and sustainable development, and on the other hand, it may also become a green weapon for new trade barriers.

Deng Di

■ Senior research expert of Sino-German "Hidden Champion" enterprises

■ Director of the Research Center for Cross-Cultural Management, Jinan University

If you summarize the theme of this year's industry fair in two words, I think the first is intelligence, and the second is environmental protection, which are also the two biggest concerns of Europeans in the manufacturing industry. The common purpose of the two words is the sustainability of industry.

Intelligence, it is "sustainable development" from the perspective of social human beings. Because most of the challenges felt by Europeans come from the challenges of manufacturing. Labor costs are rising, people are becoming more reluctant to perform simple and repetitive tasks, and Germany is even promoting a four-day workweek. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the dependence of the manufacturing industry on simple and repetitive labor as soon as possible.

The coolest part of this year's CIIF is the industrial Internet and AI (artificial intelligence), especially the use of AI.

Focusing on these two themes, the two local giants in Germany, Siemens, which is from automation, and SAP, which is from management software, start from their relatively different positions, and present the most cutting-edge evolution of the manufacturing industry in their respective huge exhibition halls.

SAP even demonstrated a complete story of the entire process management of one of its customers, Krones, the hidden champion of global beverage bottling equipment, depicting the prototype of the "industrial metaverse" of a manufacturing company, from design and production to operation and maintenance, sales and service.

We also saw the "performance" of the industrial metaverse at the scene: screw a screw, the robot will screw it first, and judge how many turns to screw in the end through the torque of the screw.

For example, if an engineer at a company headquarters in Germany, a factory manager in Suzhou, China, and a supplier in Foshan, Guangdong, were to work together to commission a factory that was working, how could colleagues in different locations get involved?

The ideal way is to be in a virtual but exactly like the real one like the game in the Three-Body Problem. First, the digital twin method is used to simulate the factory environment thousands of miles away, and then interact directly. For example, a German colleague can point to a certain place and say that the temperature and humidity need to be adjusted, and somewhere there may be a replacement of a specification of parts.

On this basis, a large language model can be added to interact with the machine and directly interrogate the machine through voice or text. For example, what is the output of the production line today, what is the qualification rate of the product, and what are the main reasons for the unqualified products produced at certain time nodes.

The industrial metaverse is equivalent to integrating the new advances in artificial intelligence and digital technology in the past two or three years into the operation of enterprises, and it is a step further on the basis of the "digital twin".

During this visit, entrepreneurs opened their horizons and saw the possibility of industrial metaverse and AI dialogue models in industrial applications. The second is to see the advancement of Industry 4.0, that is, whether more small and medium-sized enterprises and suppliers can be brought on board. However, Industry 4.0 is currently mainly promoted by cutting-edge technology companies, and small and medium-sized enterprises are not very involved.

The second key word is environmental protection, which is "sustainable development" from the perspective of the natural environment.

In China, more industries and enterprises related to environmental protection will emphasize these, but in today's Europe, no matter which industrial chain, which link, large companies or small companies, are talking about environmental protection issues.

One is energy conservation, the European battery industry is rolling out the Battery Pass, which will require all batteries to leave a carbon footprint at every step from raw materials to production to delivery.

In addition, major companies such as the Fraunhofer-Gesellsch, which is engaged in basic research, and Bosch are exhibiting their latest achievements in the promotion of hydrogen energy industrialization.

Another aspect is material conservation and recyclability. Various bio-based degradable materials are being explored. Even the terminals in the distribution box made by Phoenix are being made of soybean husks. Wherever plastic is not to be used, use as little as possible. I haven't been to Europe for 7 years, and I found that the bottle of mineral water has become significantly lighter.

Zhang Yingchun

■ Founder of Longou Consulting

■ Author of the best-selling management book "Organization Can Manage People Well".

This is my fifth year visiting the Hannover Messe and I have seen some noticeable changes.

◎ The first change is that there are more Chinese entrepreneurs who come to visit Hannover. Many people who may have been "waiting, relying on, and asking" in China, but now they have come out and begun to have some contact with foreign customers, which also means rolling up. Most of these enterprises are engaged in foreign trade orders and supporting large German enterprises, but there are relatively few intellectual property rights and original technologies involved.

◎ The second change is also my biggest feeling for the Chinese companies participating in this exhibition: the product quality is improving. Like some hardware, electronic components, and pneumatic components, it is obvious that in terms of overall craftsmanship and quality, it is very different from the shoddy production of the previous few years.

◎ The third change is the evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things. For example, the Industrial Internet of Things in Hall 14 has been taken as the focus. They also emphasized smart energy, which refers to the intelligent use and control of energy. For example, all electrical appliances can be remotely controlled, and gas leaks can be detected at the first time.

The convergence of smart factories and the Industrial Internet of Things has formed the iconic Industry 4.0 in a sense, which has given me a glimpse of the future of manufacturing. However, there is still a long way to go before Industry 4.0 is truly reached.

In fact, for so many years, no company has strictly realized Industry 4.0. In 2019, I asked a professor at the Fraunhofer Institute: "Are there any Industry 4.0 companies in Germany?" and he said he didn't know either. I asked, "Is it a black light factory at ABB?" and he said no, it was just a standardized unmanned factory, that is, an automated factory, not an Industry 4.0 factory.

Industry 4.0, or flexible customization, means that when I need it, it can be produced automatically, but there are two conditions for its establishment: the first is the Internet of Things. Of course, at this industry fair, I saw the progress of the Internet of Things. The second is 3D printing, but this technology is not mature at the moment.

For example, the printing technology of cemented carbide. We can use a printer to make metal powder into a product, but the printing of printed alloys is still difficult to cast like the chassis of a car, such as the strength of the material;

There are also issues of efficiency and cost. Car manufacturers produce a lot of cars a day, but not many people rely on 3D printing to produce this bulk commodity, and in the end, they can only rely on molds. Whether it is the preliminary preparation or the overall cost in the later stage, it is better and cheaper to buy a stamping machine instead of buying a 3D printer.

Therefore, the traditional industrial production mode has not changed, and only the application has changed, such as production data collection, automatic data generation and other digital aspects are progressive.

Therefore, small and medium-sized enterprises cannot blindly transform to the so-called "Industry 4.0", and there is a road map for the growth of smart chemical factories.

▶ ▷The first is material technology. The real revolution at the bottom is the revolution of materials. For example, Adidas' boost sole, this "-stepping" sole, is a revolutionary breakthrough brought about by the material revolution;

▶ ▷ The second is the standardization of parts. Behind the standardization of parts is the standardization of modules. Not everything can be customized, because the cost of opening the mold is high in all aspects. The standardization of parts can reduce SKUs, reduce the load of system computing, and reduce the operating cost of the entire system.

▶ ▷ The third is the refinement of management. There are thousands of people in an enterprise, and management should become a refined process;

▶ ▷ The fourth is the automation of equipment, also called the automation of production lines. From the automation of a single equipment, to the automation of the process, to the automation of the production line, it liberates the manual link and reduces the labor intensity of people;

▶ ▷ The fifth is the intellectualization of the factory. For example, some operations originally required voice commands, but then I only needed to scan the code, and the process plan was automatically discharged;

▶ ▷ The sixth is the digitalization of enterprises. After the factory is intelligent, all the data can be collected, and it can advance to the digitalization of the enterprise.

Relaxation

■ Chairman of Shanghai Dachi Industrial Architectural Design

From the point of view of the site, this year's area is the same as last year's scale, which is half of the pre-epidemic level.

And this year, the message of the large German industrial groups at the exhibition has also changed.

Before the epidemic, everyone was conveying the concept of Industry 4.0, talking about the vision, and talking about the future.

Last year, everyone started to focus on the industry. For example, 1/3 of Siemens' booth focused on the new energy industry, including automobile production, new energy battery production, and digital twin factory design.

And compared with last year, when everyone was proposing solutions for new energy batteries and automobiles, this year we began to mainly mention the concepts of sustainable development and low carbon.

For example, it will mention the application of sustainable development and low carbon in the food and beverage and chemical industries. Siemens has also followed last year's pragmatism plan, preferring to accelerate digital transformation in process-oriented industries such as food and beverage brewing and pharmaceuticals.

These industries that are focused on are mainly about the basic consumer goods most commonly used by the people, plus some large manufacturers in the field of automation in Europe, the performance in Europe has shrunk by 1/3 of the phenomenon, perhaps because of everyone's lack of investment, the market is relatively sluggish, and we pay more attention to food, drink, and daily necessities.

What impressed me most about this year's exhibition was the explosion of AI applications.

For example, Microsoft's showroom was crowded, and their slogan was called "Accelerating the Transformation of Industry to AI".

Internally, they have cooperated with nearly a dozen different types of industrial companies, such as KUKA Robotics, Siemens, Stader, as well as industrial software companies PTC and Ansys, for comprehensive AI applications.

For example, in clerical work, PPT can be more efficient than before, and in the technical field, the original robot automation control is more complicated, but now it can be more simple and convenient PLC programming.

To a certain extent, this can alleviate the problem of "difficulty in recruiting" in Europe and the United States, and use AI to improve management efficiency.

It is worth mentioning that AI applications from the United States are becoming more and more integrated with German companies in the field of automation.

For example, in the original factory, if you want to arrange a few machine tools, a few robots, a few artificial production lines, and a few workers, you need very experienced process layout engineers to make the layout.

Microsoft's booth showed an application that can automatically generate different process layout schemes as long as the required production capacity is entered, plus the intensity and cost of investment, as well as production efficiency, and the German SAP also mentioned the use of AI technology in logistics process optimization.

At the exhibition, it can be seen that there are more and more application scenarios in which the word AI appears in all walks of life, which is equivalent to some German companies that have precipitated a lot of industrial knowledge into AI large models.

However, it should be added that AI has not yet reached the level where it can participate in the final manufacturing and coordinate the overall production, so it can only focus on manufacturing, design and plan the layout of the production line, optimize the supply chain, and do the PIC programming of robot actions and automation equipment.

Nowadays, there is a big gap between domestic industrial enterprises and foreign industrial enterprises in AI applications.

In terms of AI industrial software, especially American Internet companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and American industrial software such as PDC, their applications are difficult to display in China, and it will be difficult to land.

When the industry of Europe and the United States is put together with the AI of the United States, we, as an industrial power, have less obvious advantages than in the past.

本篇作者 | 巴九灵 | 责任编辑 | 何梦飞

主编 | 何梦飞 | 图源 | VCG

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