New Industry and China's Competitiveness

The "Internet +" action plan and the "Made in China 2025" action plan appeared in this year's government work report. This is no accident.

With scale advantages and price advantages, Chinese manufacturing has swept the world in more than 10 years. By 2007, 70% of the world's footwear and toys, more than 50% of PCs, mobile phones, color TVs, air conditioners, and 40% of textiles were produced in China. In that year, a book named "Leaving the Year of Made in China" was sold well in the United States and China. The book concluded that "price will always overcome our values ​​and we cannot reject Chinese-made products." By 2010, China will surpass the United States as the world's largest manufacturing country in terms of output value.

But before and after this, the fourth industrial revolution with the new generation of information technology as the core driver began quietly. As of June 2014, Germany, the United States, Japan, Britain, South Korea and other countries have all put forward their own national strategies to adapt to and lead the new industrial revolution. One of the representatives is Germany's "Industry 4.0" strategy.

The first industrial revolution that began in the late 18th century was the symbol of a steam engine. The result was the mechanization of machines to replace human power. The second industrial revolution that began in the late 19th century symbolized electricity, and the result was electrification and automation. In the middle of the 20th century, information technology represented by computers was booming, industrialization and informatization were deeply integrated, and production efficiency increased exponentially, which was considered as the third industrial revolution.

Since the 1990s, a new generation of information technology, the Internet, has appeared. 20 years later, the PC Internet has been upgraded to the mobile Internet. Internet companies have surpassed traditional IT companies such as computer software to become representatives of technology companies and revolutionized the media. , entertainment, retail, travel, and other industries that are directly related to consumers.

Around 2011, with the concept of “Industrie 4.0” proposed by the Germans, Internet technology began to enter and transform large-scale industrial enterprises. Basically, we can compare the concepts of “Industry 4.0”, the Internet of Things, and the Industrial Internet, which were proposed by the Germans and the Americans, respectively, and used them interchangeably. They all meant that the fourth industrial revolution had kicked off.

The Internet has gone through three stages so far. The first stage is the interconnection of people and information. The representative company is Yahoo Google Baidu Sina; the second stage is the interconnection of people (representing the company is Facebook Twitter Tecent) and the interconnection of people and commodities (representing the company is Amazon Alibaba Jingdong The third phase has just begun. It is the interconnection of objects and things. The representative company is Siemens who proposed the concept of “Industry 4.0” and GE that put forward the concept of “Industrial Internet”.

The first two phases are called the consumer internet, and it has reached the ends of the world in terms of people, people and goods. With a few fingers, elementary school students who have been separated for decades will appear in front of them and knock a few keyboards. The favorite goods thousands of miles away will be sent to their homes. Then, in the third phase, at the industrial Internet stage, will there be similar miraculous and even more miraculous things happen?

Enterprises that have completed the transformation of the industrial Internet are digital, data-driven enterprises with full value chains. First of all, the company masters complete internal data in real time: people's data (the past management software can be realized but now can be cheaper and more convenient), the operating data of the machine equipment (in the past limited mastery); secondly, the integrity of each link of the supply chain is grasped in real time. Data (in the past limited mastery); third, real-time mastery of the customer/consumer's complete data (in the past limited mastery).

In the past, companies did not want to master these data, but they did not have the technical means or the cost was too high. However, without such data, business operations are like scorpions, and success or failure depends largely on experience and luck.

For example, companies all know that they want to sell their products at a fixed price. They all know that they want to minimize inventory, but it is difficult to do so because of lack of information for decision-making.

Only an aristocratic company like Wal-Mart can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to send bar-coded satellites to monitor store data in real time and guide the back-end logistics production.

Nowadays, the ubiquitous mobile Internet enables companies to connect consumers and channel providers at low cost, collect and analyze consumer behavior data, and realize the full life cycle management of products from design to sales. The popularity of radio frequency technology and sensors (unit price has fallen below US$100) enables companies to collect and analyze machine operation data, analyze the plant's operations in real time, and realize the fine-tuned operations that were previously in demand.

When Wang Xitang was formerly an old Yan, he flew into the homes of ordinary people. This is the power of technology. What needs to be emphasized is that only when the data is collected, the analysis capability of the back-end cannot keep up, and data cannot be used to guide actions. It is just datarich (data enrichment) rather than datadriven (data-driven), and it cannot be driven by data. It cannot be said to have achieved Industry 4.0.

In the first and second phases of the Internet, China initially fell behind, but it quickly caught up and shared its ties with the United States. In the process of catching up, Tencent and Ali have created two companies with market value of 200 billion US dollars. In the third phase, China is temporarily lagging behind, and whether it can come from behind can not be blindly optimistic. Because unlike the consumer Internet, the Industrial Internet is not a flat floor, but is closely related to the previous industrial heritage. This concept was put forward by the century-old Siemens and GE instead of the Silicon Valley upstarts. This is the reason.

The Internet of Things is not the end of the Internet. US data consulting company Gartner expects that by 2020, 26 billion sensors will be installed on various types of equipment. At the same time, artificial intelligence technology is also booming. In the near future, a wide range of real-time interconnections of people, objects, and characters will become the norm. An interconnected world will no longer be imagined and become a reality. This will profoundly reshape the commercial operations and social patterns of the planet.