From the series Major industrial groups in China
Analysing the WTO data for 2023, it emerges that China exported goods worth $3,379 billion, surpassing the European Union and the United States. Industrial machinery accounted for over 7% of exports and electrical machinery 9%. In the same sectors, Chinese imports did not reach 40% of the value of exports, indicating that these are among the pillars of Beijing’s export economy.
Sany Heavy Industry
In this newspaper we have already examined the Chinese mechanical engineering giant Sinomach. But in the field of machine construction, Sany Heavy Industry also holds a prominent position, particularly in excavators, cranes, industrial elevators, and cement machinery. The company, based in Changsha (Hunan) since 1991, was founded by Liang Wengen, who had previously been an executive at a State-owned arms factory, and is its main shareholder. Sany had a 2023 turnover of over $10 billion; it has 90,000 employees and is highly internationalised, with production facilities not only in China but also in India, Indonesia, Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. Only 40% of its turnover comes from the Chinese market.
Sany became the world’s leading company for cement-processing machinery thanks to the 2012 acquisition of the German company Putzmeister, which manufactures pumps and other equipment for cement processing and transport. Like all large groups, Sany also operates in other sectors, for example, in renewable energy, highlighted by the installation in October 2024 of a 15-megawatt (MW) wind turbine, which at the time was the largest onshore wind turbine in the world.
Dongfang Electric
In the electromechanical industry, however, China has not yet produced a business capable of competing on equal terms with global giants such as Siemens, General Electric, Mitsubishi Electric, or ABB. Nevertheless, some companies stand out as they seek their own path to compete in the international market.
Dongfang Electric Corporation is a State-owned enterprise founded in 1958, with headquarters in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Its products include industrial automation equipment, boilers, electric motors, and particularly steam and wind turbines. In addition to Sichuan, the company’s sites in China span Guangdong, Tianjin, Zhejiang, and Hubei, and abroad it is present in India and Indonesia. Its financial report for 2022 shows a turnover of €7.3 billion, with profits of €380 million. Dongfang Electric has been active in the electrical energy sector for over 60 years, supplying about a third of the equipment in the sector; with over 17,000 employees, it is one of the largest groups in the sector worldwide.
The company has sold electricity generation plants in Vietnam, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ethiopia. Moreover, it has entered the nuclear sector, with the construction and commissioning of a 1.75-gigawatt (GW) reactor. Last October, it installed a 26-MW wind turbine, the largest offshore wind turbine in the world: the hub of the nacelle is 185 metres above sea level, equivalent to the height of a 63-storey building, and the turbine can power 55,000 homes.
Harbin Electric
In the North-East, in Heilongjiang, Harbin Electric Corporation developed during China’s first Five-Year Plan, starting off by participating in six key industrial construction projects, with the help of the USSR. The 1953-1957 plan aimed to focus the industrialisation efforts of the young People’s Republic of China on 694 large and medium projects, of which 156 were developed with the help of the USSR. To achieve the objectives of the six projects, three factories in Harbin, the provincial capital, were merged: Harbin Boiler, Harbin Electric Machinery, and Harbin Turbine thus formed China’s first base for the research, development, and construction of power-generation equipment.
Today Harbin Electric describes itself as a State-owned enterprise, the backbone of national security and one of the vital arteries of the economy
. With a 2023 turnover of €3.7 billion and over 11,000 employees, the group manufactures steam turbines, boilers, generators for power plants, and the main components for nuclear power plants. Harbin Electric highlights its capacity for research and collaboration with the academic world. The number of employees has more than halved over the past ten years, and turnover is also declining, but this is not the case for the company’s contributions to the development of new technologies. On December 13th, 2024, it announced the successful completion of full-load tests at the Binzhou power plant in Shandong, equipped with the world’s first 660-MW ultra-supercritical circulating fluidised bed (USC-CFB) generation unit. This is an advanced technology for high-efficiency coal combustion with low emission standards. Once fully operational, it will be able to utilise up to 2 million tonnes of low-calorific coal and other lower-quality fuels. Harbin Electric Corporation supplied the plant’s three main components: the boiler, the turbine, and the generator.
At the international level, the company cooperates with US’s General Electric in the field of gas turbines and wind power generation. In 2024, it also supplied equipment for power generation to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Abu Dhabi, and Mexico.
Shanghai Electric
Shanghai Electric is the Chinese group with the highest turnover. With 75,000 employees, it closed the 2023 financial year with sales of nearly €15 billion and a net profit of €280 million. The company’s origins date back to 1902 with the founding of the Shanghai Dalong Machinery Factory, which came under the control of the Shanghai municipality in 1954.
Shanghai Dalong, founded by Chinese entrepreneur Yan Yutang with seven employees, used to carry out small repairs on foreign merchant ships arriving in Shanghai Bay, eventually employing 50 workers on the eve of World War I. At the end of hostilities, Yan began to cooperate with the Chinese domestic industry in the construction of textile manufacturing machines and employed 1,300 workers by 1937. At the time, it was considered the only Chinese company capable of building machines for the textile industry on a large scale
(Shanghai Electric, bimonthly, 2022).
After World War II and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the company became involved in the repair of electric generators; in early 1953, it started to handle generators built by General Electric, which were parachuted in during the war of resistance against Japan, and had become the local power source. With the first Five-Year Plan, it was decided to develop a 6-MW steam turbine, which became operational in 1954, the year the company came under the control of the Shanghai municipality. It remained so in various forms until 2004, when it became a joint-stock company, named Shanghai Electric.
Today the group operates in the electromechanical sector, specialising in the generation and distribution of electric energy, manufacturing, and automation systems. The business is structured into various divisions: the main one, with over 12,000 employees, deals with power generation, with sales exceeding €7 billion. A subsidiary of this division is Shanghai Electric Gas Turbine, a joint venture established in November 2014 between Shanghai Electric and Ansaldo Energia (Italy), and operating in the field of gas turbines, in the Chinese market and in the countries along the New Silk Road. In parallel, Shanghai Electric had acquired 40% of Ansaldo Energia’s shares. Today, following a capital increase of the Genoa-based company in 2022, in which the Chinese company did not participate, its stake has fallen to 12%. The joint venture sold 80 gas turbines, including 40 in the last four years, according to Xinhua and Ansaldo company sources. Finally, last year, the first combined-cycle power plant equipped with an Ansaldo Energia GT36 gas turbine began operations in the Minhang Industrial Zone in Shanghai.
Agreements and competition
The agreement with Ansaldo is not an isolated case. The Shanghai Electric Power Transmission and Distribution Engineering Division, with over €1 billion in revenue, has companies cooperating with Siemens, Schneider, and Hitachi Energy. The elevator division, Shanghai Mitsubishi Elevator, is a joint venture with Japan’s Mitsubishi, has 12,000 employees and is managed by the Chinese company. In the robotics field, Shanghai Electric collaborates with Japan’s Fanuc; in the automation division, with 4,500 employees, it is worth noting the 2016 acquisition of Germany’s Broetje-Automation GmbH, with 450 technicians, specialising in aircraft assembly systems.
In the industrial electromechanics sector, the Dragon has not yet taken flight to reach the heights of global competition. However, an April report by KfW, the German development bank, provides an indication of the state of competition between Chinese and German businesses in the European machinery market, which is considered mature
and difficult to conquer. Germany’s share of machinery imports in EU countries has fallen from 30% in 2012 to 28% today, while China’s has risen from 7% to 10%. Every year, leveraging its vast domestic market, China captures a few percentage points of global market share, jostling with the major industrial groups of the old powers while also striking deals with them.