This year marks APEC China Year. From November 18 to 19, the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting will be held in Shenzhen. The theme is "Building an Asia-Pacific Community, Promoting Common Prosperity," with openness, innovation, and cooperation listed as the three priority areas.
For the Greater Bay Area (GBA), the region with the highest density of manufacturing in China, this is also an opportunity to showcase its industrial strengths to the Asia-Pacific region.
On October 20, ahead of the APEC meetings, the online thematic campaign "Witnessing the New Power of China's Intelligent Manufacturing - APEC in the GBA" was launched in Guangzhou. Media reporters, influencers, experts, scholars, and young students formed a delegation to visit key enterprises and industrial platforms in Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen. Lei Technology also joined this delegation to witness the power of intelligent manufacturing in the GBA.
On October 20, we visited the XPeng Guangzhou Intelligent Manufacturing Base in Huangpu, Guangzhou, CanSemi Technology, and the Fushan Circular Economy Industrial Park.
These three enterprises represent car manufacturing, chip fabrication, and urban waste treatment, perfectly aligning with the chain from underlying chips to intelligent terminals and green recycling. The chips are supplied locally to the vehicles, and the waste generated after the vehicles are on the road can be collected and converted into electricity within the same region.
Smart, Efficient, and Green: XPeng Transforms Its Intelligent Manufacturing Base into an Educational Tour Base
Our first stop was the XPeng Guangzhou Intelligent Manufacturing Base located in the Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City. Upon entering, we first saw the brand exhibition hall building, with an XPeng P7 prominently displayed on the exterior wall. Reportedly, this car is not an ordinary display model, but the third vehicle officially rolled off the production line for the P7, bearing the serial number 003.
Inside the factory, we saw a production line built to Industry 4.0 standards. This intelligent manufacturing base adopts XPeng's own X-SEG concept, a combination of smart, efficient, and green. The core relies on the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) to integrate IoT (Internet of Things) and monitoring technologies throughout the entire production process.
Equipment status, process flows, quality information, and production progress—these four types of data can be monitored in real-time within the digital system, turning the factory into a highly transparent quality intelligent manufacturing platform.
A vehicle here must go through four major processes: stamping, welding, painting, and final assembly. Walking along the production flow, we could see how a steel plate and individual parts are transformed into a complete vehicle.
Interestingly, this base does not treat itself as a closed production workshop. Instead, centered around the "XPeng Intelligent Manufacturing Academy," it integrates the brand exhibition hall, production lines, educational workshops, and photo-op landscapes into an industrial cultural tourism space that hosts corporate team-building and study tours for primary and secondary school students.
We also saw many kindergarten children and foreign visitors touring the site. The first-floor brand exhibition hall has been upgraded into a technology center, the third floor features an immersive smart and fun educational workshop, and even the second and fourth floors are equipped with the same canteen used by the XPeng factory staff, making the factory tour far from boring.
Lei Technology has always closely followed XPeng's developments. After more than a decade of growth, XPeng Motors is now listed among the Top 500 Chinese Manufacturing Enterprises and the Top 500 Private Enterprises in China. It has won the First Prize of the Science and Technology Award from the China Society of Automotive Engineers, and is recognized as a High-Tech Enterprise, a Guangdong Provincial Engineering Technology Center, and a Guangdong Provincial Enterprise Technology Center.
Producing 120,00012-Inch Wafers per Month: Huangpu Cultivates Its Own Chip Manufacturing
Leaving the XPeng intelligent manufacturing base, our second stop was CanSemi Technology, also located in the Knowledge City.
The IC (Integrated Circuit) is often called the pearl on the crown of industry, and CanSemi focuses on its most challenging segment: wafer manufacturing.
Founded in December 2017, it is currently the first 12-inch analog chip manufacturing enterprise in Guangdong Province and the GBA to enter mass production, primarily targeting practical application scenarios such as IoT (Internet of Things) and automotive electronics.
The pace of CanSemi is known in the industry as the "CanSemi Speed."
The Phase I project started piling in March 2018 and achieved mass production in 2019, taking only 18 months. While fast, the production line construction, team building, and process standardization were completed simultaneously, ensuring that mass production means stable production, and stable production means high quality.
According to the plan, once Phases I to IV are fully built and reach capacity, the facility will achieve a scale of producing 120,000 12-inch wafers per month.
We also saw the core product, 12-inch wafers, at the center of the exhibition hall. The larger the wafer diameter, the more chips can be cut from a single wafer, resulting in higher efficiency and lower costs. However, the requirements for material purity and equipment precision also increase exponentially.
The silicon wafers used by CanSemi have a purity of over 99.9999999%. A single wafer must undergo four core processes—lithography, etching, diffusion, and thin film deposition—through hundreds of repeated and stacked steps to build the 3D structure inside the chip. Lithography precisely prints the designed circuit patterns at the nanometer level, etching materializes the patterns, diffusion alters the material's conductivity through ion implantation, and thin film deposition grows a uniform and stable solid layer on the surface. The parameters of every step are strictly controlled.
In the workshop, we could see the automated material handling system, known as the "overhead crane system," where virtual and physical systems are deeply integrated, minimizing fluctuations caused by manual operations. Coupled with real-time monitoring, Statistical Process Control (SPC), and automated defect detection, every wafer and every process is under lean management. Reportedly, CanSemi's product yield rate exceeds 98%. Currently, its industrial-grade and automotive-grade chips are used in products from automakers such as GAC, and the company has also received a nomination for the 8th Guangdong Provincial Government Quality Award.
Notably, CanSemi is the president unit of the Guangzhou Semiconductor Association and the Guangdong Integrated Circuit Industry Association, as well as the founding chairman unit of the Greater Bay Area Semiconductor Industry Alliance.
After settling in Guangzhou, CanSemi has radiated its manufacturing capabilities and process standards to upstream and downstream sectors, attracting nearly
150 semiconductor enterprises to select sites, of which 90 have signed agreements and settled. The area around Huangpu is gradually assembling a full chain covering material R&D, equipment manufacturing, chip design, packaging and testing, and terminal applications.
The Most Unique AAA Tourist Attraction: An Industrial Park That Turns Waste into Electricity
The third stop, the Fushan Circular Economy Industrial Park, has a very different vibe from the first two. Located in Huangpu, it is invested, built, and operated by Guangzhou Ringtou Fushan Environmental Protection Energy Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Guangzhou Ringtou Yongxing Group.
The park covers an area of 1,604 mu, with a total domestic waste treatment capacity of 12,600 tons per day, plus a hazardous waste treatment capacity of 78,000 tons per year. It integrates multiple projects including waste incineration, biomass, hazardous waste, medical waste, sewage, and furnace slag treatment, making it one of the most comprehensively planned and processed circular economy industrial parks in China.
The most striking feature in the park is a 262.5-meter-high sightseeing tower built on top of the chimney. Adopting the design concept of "a round sky and a square earth," it is the first in China to directly convert the chimney of a waste incineration power plant into an industrial tourism sightseeing tower. Visitors standing on the observation platform 262.5 meters above the ground can look through the floor-to-ceiling glass to see the production site below, which is truly spectacular.
The main power generation is handled by the Guangzhou Third Resource Thermal Power Plant. Built in two phases, it has a total treatment capacity of 9,300 tons per day, making it one of the largest and most challenging waste incineration power plants to build in China.
It is also the first incineration power plant in China built on a 60-meter-high fill slope, with the steam turbine and main control workshop adopting an elevated structure. The plant primarily processes domestic waste from the central urban area of Guangzhou, handling 3.1 million tons of waste annually. Through high-temperature incineration, the waste is converted into electricity, with an annual grid-connected power generation exceeding 1.2 billion kWh, meeting the annual electricity needs of 420,000 households and helping Guangzhou achieve zero landfill of raw domestic waste.
The park also houses the Biomass Comprehensive Treatment Plant of the Guangzhou Eastern Solid Resource Recycling Center, with a treatment capacity of 3,300 tons per day. It is the world's largest joint treatment project for urban organic waste, equipped with the world's largest single-unit joint anaerobic system. By utilizing biogas for power generation, it can generate 240,000 kWh of electricity and produce 150 tons of steam daily.
How is this massive facility managed? The park uses an information system for management and monitoring to achieve resource sharing. It also employs intelligent methods such as infrared thermal imaging, inspection robots, and drone patrols for equipment inspection and high-altitude facility surveillance, reducing manual operations in high-risk scenarios.
For this reason, Fushan is not just a treatment plant. It is also a national AAA-level tourist attraction, one of the first batch of national science popularization education bases from 2021 to 2025, and a national ecological environment education base. It has won the Zhan Tianyou Award of the China Civil Engineering Society, the National Quality Engineering Gold Award, and the China Steel Structure Gold Award "Yuegang Award." Today, it is open to the public for free, using physical objects, pictures, and videos to educate citizens about waste classification and terminal treatment processes.
Conclusion
After a day of visits, it is clear that these three enterprises represent three different industries. XPeng represents intelligent terminals targeting consumer groups, CanSemi is responsible for supplementing the critical link of chip manufacturing, and Fushan collects the waste generated by urban operations and converts it back into energy. These three achieve a self-contained ecosystem in Huangpu, and there are many similar examples.
In fact, by 2025, the operating revenue of industrial enterprises above designated size in Guangdong Province reached CNY 9.34 trillion, ranking first in the country. It boasts 8 national advanced manufacturing clusters and 10 trillion-yuan-level industrial clusters. What this tour aims to show is the newly grown parts beyond scale, whether the local area can fill in the critical links of the industrial chain on its own, and whether technologies can connect with each other within the same region.
A month later, the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting will be held in Shenzhen. As the Asia-Pacific's gaze turns to the Greater Bay Area, what new links is this highly concentrated manufacturing region creating, and how is it preparing to engage in industrial cooperation with the Asia-Pacific region? The complete vehicles, chips, and power plants we visited in Huangpu serve as a concrete answer to this.
Lei Technology AI Hardware Group | Editor: Xiaolin | Supervisor: Luo Chao