Caixin: The theme of this Summer Davos is “The New Frontier of Future growth”. In your opinion, what role does intelligent manufacturing play in the new frontier of future growth? What is the new frontier of smart manufacturing?

Chai Xiaozhou: New quality productivity, industrial upgrading and transformation, and high-quality development are all related to intelligent manufacturing. With the intelligent development of the entire manufacturing industry, Honeywell focused on three trends, automation, future aviation and energy transition, and reintegrated four business segments. Among them, green innovation is a very important growth point.

NTE207-CBNS-0000 About 60 percent of Honeywell’s innovative research and development starts with improving customers’ environmental and social performance. At the same time, the company’s own manufacturing operations are also low-carbon and sustainable, with four of its more than 20 plants in China being national or provincial green plants.

China’s “dual carbon” goal aims to be carbon neutral by 2060, while Honeywell has committed to achieving carbon neutrality for all business operations and facilities by 2035. In order to achieve this goal, we started early to do relevant work, many of the company’s technologies are related to the energy transition, such as sustainable aviation fuel, waste plastic recycling, carbon capture, utilization and storage technology.

With the continuous hot AI, is there any innovative breakthrough or bright spot in intelligent manufacturing recently?

Chai Xiaozhou: Relying on the strong advantages and rich experience in automation technology, Honeywell is also actively applying these emerging technologies. In terms of industrial process control management, we use emerging technologies such as AI to help customers improve efficiency in energy utilization, operations management, manufacturing and other fields to achieve sustainable development and digital transformation goals.

In terms of employee training, some positions require rich experience accumulation, and AI helps digitize these experiences, so that newly enrolled college students can be qualified for such positions. Honeywell uses a variety of similar technologies to help customers train new employees more effectively, handle and control industrial processes more effectively, and achieve efficiencies and cost reductions.

NTE207-CBNS-0000 For Honeywell itself, we solidified the management philosophy through digital means, and in Suzhou factory, for example, we basically achieved paperless through automated transformation.

Caixin: Honeywell Intelligent Industries is currently in the main domestic service areas, upstream and downstream industry chain partners of domestic and foreign enterprises distribution is what?

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

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, it was difficult for such enterprises to enter the industrial field with strict requirements, but at that time, the delivery time of international chip factories was long and the production capacity was insufficient, so we chose to cooperate with some domestic enterprises, and at the same time, we solved the problem of our own chip shortage, which allowed the company to continue to supply in the Chinese market steadily under extremely difficult external conditions.

Caixin: What is the main direction of the future strategy?

Chai Xiaozhou: Honeywell has always promoted the concept of “East serves East.” In addition to production and sales, we began to establish a local R & D team very early. At present, our intelligent Industry Technology Group has about 500 full-time R&D personnel in China. The company’s strong investment in the local also got good results, such as the current sensor used in new energy electric vehicles is independently developed by the local team and produced by the Nanjing factory. In this field, we occupy a very leading position in the industry, and most of the mainstream electric vehicles in China use our products. Moreover, as China’s new energy electric vehicles become stronger and bigger, these products can further serve overseas markets.