The second installment of a series published by JETRO on August 4, 2025, providing detailed analysis of China's IIOT industry ecosystem and enterprise adoption cases.
China's IIOT market continues rapid growth, with Saidi Consulting predicting an average annual growth rate of 14.7% from 2023 to 2026, reaching a market size of 1.4862 trillion yuan (approximately 30 trillion yen) by 2026. The industrial structure shows horizontal division of labor by layer, with IT giants like Baidu, Tencent, Huawei Technologies, Alibaba Group, and JD Group entering the PaaS layer, while numerous SMEs and startups participate in the SaaS layer.
Chinese enterprise IIOT adoption is classified into two approaches: "self-development type" and "external utilization type." As a representative of self-development, Haier achieved mass customization with COSMOPlat, integrating supply chain management from development to sales for cost reduction. SANY Heavy Industry uses ROOTCLOUD to integrate over 40 smart factories across China, with Beijing factory and Changsha No.18 factory certified as lighthouse factories. Furthermore, in 2022, they achieved cross-border IIOT in Indonesia, enabling real-time information sharing with Chinese headquarters 3,000 kilometers away.
In external utilization type, ROBAM achieved almost complete unmanned automation across all processes in their third factory, establishing an on-demand ordering system with minimal inventory through collaboration with Alibaba Cloud and ERP companies. GAC Aion also built smart factories in collaboration with external solution companies.
For Japanese companies, the article suggests the importance of clearly defining self-development areas related to core technologies and organizing efficient external platform utilization areas, with the necessity of formulating comprehensive strategies emphasizing intellectual property protection and data management.
The article demonstrates through specific cases that Chinese companies have achieved overall optimization and improved production efficiency and competitiveness under government support.