Xi'an's municipal committee recently held its tenth plenary session and economic work conference, setting out the city's plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan period and placing the construction of a modern industrial system at the centre of its growth strategy.
A plan matters only if it is carried out. Across Xi'an, a group of established companies are turning that strategy into concrete work in their own fields — upgrading traditional industries, growing new ones and laying groundwork for those still emerging.
Innovation, applied to work that matters
Facing both opportunity and pressure in the machine tool and cutting tool market, Xi'an Wanwei Machinery has committed to advanced manufacturing and technical independence, pursuing a specialised path.
"When an industry is changing, a company needs to be clear about where it stands and concentrate on what it does well," said chairman and general manager Tong Gang. Wanwei has followed the growth of aerospace manufacturing, investing steadily in areas such as specialist aerospace grooving tools and building a series of products benchmarked against the international leaders.
The company has also taken on new materials and processes, working with universities to solve difficult problems in high-performance whisker ceramics, and exploring 3D printing to build lighter internal coolant channels into its tools — raising machining throughput on aluminium die-cast electric vehicle housings several times over.
Precision, applied to breaking down data silos
A modern industrial system depends on modern manufacturing capability, and precision measurement is both the eye of advanced manufacturing and the foundation of quality.
"Carrying out the plenary session's direction means turning it into concrete work: using precision measurement to raise the quality of what this region builds," said Song Jianzhong, chairman of Xi'an AEH Industrial Metrology. AEH supplies complete measurement solutions to the city's priority supply chains in electric vehicles, semiconductors and photonics, and aerospace — from gear measuring centres holding accuracy on transmission components, to advanced optical measuring machines working at micron level, to multi-sensor coordinate measuring machines handling complex structures.
AEH's EMRP quality management platform is built to break down the data silos inside a company, letting quality data flow and be analysed across the whole operation, and giving the region's precision measurement industry a firm quality foundation as it becomes more advanced, more intelligent
and more sustainable.
Silicon, applied to the industries still emerging
Companies growing as the city grows is becoming the engine behind Xi'an's ambition to be a source of new productive capability in western China.
Among companies working on newer and future industries, Xinpai Technology has built out a full chain of capability across two of Xi'an's strategic priorities: semiconductors and the low-altitude economy.
Chairman Luo Yi explained that over 17 years Xinpai has built a complete system running from semiconductor power device development through to electric drive systems for EVs and validation of power systems for low-altitude aircraft. Advanced laboratories, pilot production lines and a UAV test field within its industrial park provide the development and testing capability behind that work. It strengthens the local integrated circuit supply chain and supplies the power and energy solutions the low-altitude economy needs.
How you begin shapes what follows. Across Xi'an, industrial companies are working on their own fundamentals — solving hard problems in basic materials, building intelligent quality management platforms, developing the core devices future industries will need. Together they are what a modern industrial base is actually made of.