Guangdong champions new industry model

Showcases to factories

If Guangzhou's private innovators are redefining how people move, manufacturers in Dongguan and Shenzhen are transforming how things are made.

Guangdong Topstar Technology Co, a Dongguan-based industrial robotics manufacturer, has spent nearly two decades evolving alongside the province's vast factory economy. Starting with automation solutions for injection molding workshops, the company later expanded into multi-joint industrial robots and intelligent manufacturing systems.

In 2025, it unveiled Xiaotuo, a humanoid robot designed specifically for injection molding applications, followed by the launch of its quadruped robot Xingzai, capable of traversing rough terrain and carrying heavy loads in firefighting, security inspection and industrial maintenance scenarios.

Yet for Topstar, the biggest challenge is not building robots, but making them reliable enough for real-world applications.

"Completing a single pick-and-place task in a laboratory is relatively easy," said Zhang Jian, a senior executive at the company. "What customers want on a production line is continuous operation without failure."

Zhang said that delivering industrial-grade reliability requires advances not only in artificial intelligence algorithms, but also in the robot's mechanical body and the precision manufacturing equipment behind it.

"Many of the high-end machine tools used to produce complex robot components once depended on imports," he said. "Today, we have achieved independent control over core technologies, giving us a much stronger foundation for large-scale deployment."

The company's recent growth is a vivid reflection of the rising demand for intelligent manufacturing upgrades across China's industrial sector. Topstar's industrial robot and automation business revenue surged more than 80 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, while revenue from the computer numerical control machine tool business expanded over 60 percent.

A similar story is unfolding about 80 kilometers south in Shenzhen, where collaborative robot maker Shenzhen Dobot Corp is helping bring Chinese intelligent manufacturing solutions to factories around the world.

As the world's largest collaborative robot supplier by shipment volume in 2025, the manufacturer now gets more than half of its revenue from overseas.

Xie Kaixuan, Dobot's marketing director, said foreign customers are no longer choosing Chinese robots simply because they are cost-effective.

"Overseas clients are no longer asking us only, 'How much does your robot cost?' They are increasingly asking, 'How long can it work, and how reliably can it operate?'" Xie said.

That trust has been earned thanks to the strong industrial foundation that Chinese manufacturers have built over years of serving the world's most complicated and comprehensive production environments, he added.

"What overseas customers value most is that we can offer a trusted solution that has been repeatedly validated in China's extensive and real industrial environments and proven capable of long-term, stable operation," Xie said.

In many ways he believes the globalization of Chinese manufacturing is entering a new phase.

"China is no longer exporting simply cost-effective machines," Xie said. "We are exporting integrated intelligent solutions that customers can truly rely on."