According to the 2025 China Economic Annual Report, a new set of data is particularly noteworthy: in 2025, the value-added of digital product manufacturing above the designated size grew by 9.3% compared to the previous year, contributing 20.3% to the growth rate of all industrial enterprises above the designated size. While growing robustly itself, the digital product manufacturing sector has become a significant force driving industrial recovery, improvement, and structural optimization and upgrading.
What exactly is digital product manufacturing? It encompasses the smartphones used frequently in daily life, as well as the 5G base stations ubiquitous across both urban and rural landscapes. It includes the intelligent systems that drive efficient factory operations and the 3D printing equipment increasingly finding its way into households. It is an aggregation of new technologies, products, and business models, and also a window through which to observe the Chinese economy's forward march towards innovation.
What can we see through this window? We can see the vigorous development of the digital economy.
In 2024, the value-added of digital product manufacturing exceeded 4.8 trillion yuan, accounting for over one-third of the core digital economy industries. It supported the core digital economy industries in surpassing a new milestone of 14 trillion yuan in value-added, reaching 10.5% of GDP.
Since the beginning of the year, Alibaba Cloud released a multi-modal interaction development kit, enabling large AI models to be adapted to more hardware devices; Xiaomi surpassed Apple to become the second-largest brand by activated smartphone units in China; AI tour guides appeared in major scenic spots, ushering in new smart tourism experiences. The accelerated breakthroughs in digital technology, the robust growth of digital manufacturing, and the continuously heating digital consumption collectively generate the powerful momentum of the digital economy.
We can see the firm determination of industries to innovate.
At the beginning of the new year, positive news emerged from "Made in China" – China's exports of industrial robots grew by 48.7% in 2025, exceeding imports for the first time. Marked by this, China, the world's largest consumer of industrial robots, has become a net exporter. It is precisely through persistent independent innovation and a firm commitment to transformation and upgrading that China has rapidly built a comprehensive and well-supported robot industry chain, completing the shift from "foreign brand dominance" to "domestic brands going global."
While the "permeability" of digital technology continues to strengthen, the "drive for innovation" within industries is gathering momentum. Since 2015, China's annual output of industrial robots has grown from 33,000 units to over 600,000 units. This has not only formed an industry scale worth hundreds of billions of yuan but has also been widely applied across 71 major industrial categories in the national economy, providing the hardware foundation for tens of thousands of smart factories and propelling Chinese manufacturing towards greater intelligence, higher sophistication, and greener practices.
Looking deeper, the development practices of the digital product manufacturing sector reveal, from one perspective, the underlying logic of the current transition between old and new growth drivers in China. When the growth momentum of traditional industries faces constraints and the endogenous momentum of emerging industries is not yet fully unleashed, only by effectively balancing the cultivation of new drivers and the renewal of old ones can a smooth transition of momentum and structural optimization be achieved, thereby maintaining steady economic progress amidst a complex development environment.
It is wise to take a long-term view. Currently, digital industries, represented by digital product manufacturing, still have room for improvement in both their growth speed and depth of integration. During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, as new quality productive forces are nurtured and strengthened and new technologies rapidly integrate across countless industries, the transition and synergistic advancement of old and new drivers at a higher level will inject inexhaustible momentum into the Chinese economy's ability to "advance under pressure, developing in a new and superior direction."
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