An array of brand-new Voyah cars leave the production line. [Photo provided to en.whkfq.gov.cn]
China will foster a batch of "supply chain leaders" with strong leadership to improve the industrial ecosystem, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
What are "supply chain leaders"? Tian Xuan, vice president of The PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, said they are enterprises that can not only give full play to their own advantages, but also gather resources from other related companies, and are widely influential in the up-, mid-, and downstream firms of the industry they belong to.
Dongfeng Motor Co is playing this role in Wuhan now. On the road to digitalization, Dongfeng Motor Co has formed a brand-new business partnership network, which includes Huawei, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC).
The network is designed to help Dongfeng upgrade its auto products and boost innovation and thus help the entire automobile industry be intelligentized.
Huawei has established its second intelligent connected vehicle industrial innovation center in Wuhan, and Dongfeng has established a partnership with Huawei to jointly carry out research on RobotTaxi – an autonomous taxi developed by Dongfeng.
The auto giant also worked with China Mobile in researching and producing the Sharing-VAN – China's first L4 autonomous vehicle capable of remote control though the 5G network. The Sharing-VAN has been transformed into unmanned logistics cars, unmanned road sweepers, unmanned patrol cars, and unmanned vending cars to meet diversified demands of customers.
Dongfeng Voyah also cooperated with Siemens to build a twin digital plant, which has transformed Voyah into a highly-customized intelligent vehicle.
Automobile chip manufacturing used to be a weak link in Wuhan-made new energy cars. Two years ago, Dongfeng founded Zhixin Semiconductors Co with CRRC and has been committed to creating indigenous automobile chips.
In addition to progressing with technology titans, Dongfeng also joined forces with the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone and invested 1 billion yuan ($150 million) in an autonomous driving navigation program.
As a huge industry-university cooperative research platform, the program has attracted more than 50 enterprises at the upstream or downstream of the intelligent connected vehicle sector, forming a powerful industrial eco-chain that features overall autonomous driving solutions, auto chips, laser radar, high-definition maps, and V2X.
