ABB pouring $2b into smart technology projects

Seeing business opportunities arising out of China's fast urbanization, its move toward energy efficiency and its widespread industrial upgrading, Swiss-based power and automation company ABB Group will invest at least $2 billion in the country over the next decade, according to CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer.

"ABB highly recognizes China's important position in the global market and in our global strategy. The continuous investment in and commitment to smart technologies will help our company further maintain leadership in China," said Spiesshofer.

"We will keep an investment scale of at least $2 billion over the next 10 years," he added.

During the past decade, ABB has invested a total of $1.8 billion in China, with $136 million spent in 2013.

Spiesshofer also told China Daily that over the next five years, ABB will plunge 2 billion yuan in Xiamen, Fujian province, to set up the ABB Industry Center and Hub for power and low-voltage products in order to better integrate its service to Chinese customers.

Also, to further consolidate its footprint in China, "ABB will accelerate to go west and invest in the west," said Spiesshofer. "Over the next three years, we are going to enter 100 new Chinese cities, mostly in third-, fourth- and even lower-tier cities, doubling our presence in China from our current 109 locations."

After more than 30 years of rapid development, China's economy has come under heavy pressure in terms of resources, environment and sustainable development. Energy efficiency, industrial transformation and upgrading, and urbanization have become the new economic drivers.

In this situation, "ABB's many leading smart technologies come in handy, fully serving our customers and working together with them to achieve intelligent upgrading," said Spiesshofer, who attended the company's sixth Automation World solution exhibition and technology forum on Thursday.

"We believe that our strategy is fully in line with the needs of the market and of our Chinese customers. With market penetration, we make more of our portfolio available to existing customers - for instance, by localizing products and solutions to better suit their needs," he said.

ABB plans to continuously develop new technologies and solutions for the benefit of Chinese customers, he added. With expansion, "we enter new markets and segments, bringing technologies and solutions to customers that previously did not have access to such technologies".

In the power field, represented by high-voltage direct current technology, ABB has taken an active part in building a smart grid that can efficiently and reliably transfer clean energy from western China to load centers in the east, thus addressing local power demand and substantially reducing carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.

ABB has been involved in 19 of 24 domestic HVDC projects. Gu Chunyuan, senior vice-president of ABB Group, and chairman and CEO of ABB China, revealed that the company is discussing further cooperation with China Southern Grid.

In the industrial field, ABB's smart production and manufacturing technologies have helped many customers increase efficiency in production and resource utilization to achieve intelligent upgrading by using industrial robots.

About 80 percent of ABB's robot models and 90 percent of its robots sold in China have been localized, thus making ABB the only multinational corporation to localize the whole value chain for robotics, including R&D, production, sales, engineering and service in China.

In the fields of transportation and infrastructure, ABB has strategically cooperated with Shenzhen BYD Daimler New Technology Co Ltd to provide fast-charging DC technology and solutions.

In 2013, ABB's revenue in China, its second-largest market, grew 7.7 percent on an annual basis to $5.6 billion, 13 percent of its global total of $42 billion.

Gu said the company's business performance saw continued momentum in the first quarter, benefiting from the Chinese government's support for energy efficiency and more companies' active appeals for industrial transformation and upgrades.