The field of industrial automation is undergoing a quiet “deconstruction and reorganization”.
If domestic industrial control ten years ago was compared to a “single-soldier battle,” then today, this battle has evolved into a “group army tug-of-war.”
The traditional era of relying on a single product to dominate the world with one PLC and one frequency converter is going away, and has been replaced by a brand new keyword – industrial control ecology.
The end of the involution of single products is ecology.
For a long time in the past, the password for the rise of domestic industrial control brands was actually very simple: cost-effectiveness, quick response, and personal service.
In the fields of small control and general drives, domestic PLCs and frequency converters have carved a niche among major international manufacturers by virtue of their extremely high price advantages.
But as the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry enters the deep water zone, the simple “price war” begins to fail.
Factory owners found that after buying a bunch of highly cost-effective items, they turned out to be a nightmare when they were put together: the protocols were incompatible, and the equipment played a “cold war” every day; the data interfaces were not unified, and the industrial Internet became a “castle in the sky”; maintenance costs were high, and the system peeled off every time it was upgraded.
Modern intelligent manufacturing requires overall efficiency and the digitization, networking and intelligence of the production line.
This requires that industrial control systems can no longer operate independently, but must achieve seamless collaboration from underlying hardware, middleware, software algorithms to the upper cloud platform.
A single product that works alone often seems powerless when faced with complex full-scene requirements.
In the second half of industrial control transformation, the battle is to see who can provide a more complete, open, and compatible ecosystem.
The ecological breakthrough battle of domestic brands.
In this transformation from “selling products” to “making ecology”, the leading domestic industrial control companies have keenly turned the wheel and each has explored a very representative evolutionary path.
1. Full-category platformization: Inovance Technology’s “family bucket” strategy.
As a leader in domestic industrial control, Inovance Technology’s ecological path has strong platform features.
It is not only reconstructing its own hardware product line, but also creating a complete solution covering control, drive, execution and upper-level digitalization through the integration of “process + IT + automation”.
Through its strong system integration capabilities, it has twisted the originally scattered single products into a rope, allowing downstream customers to experience the “family bucket” worry-free service.
2. Horizontal extension of subdivided tracks: Xinjie Electric’s refined ecology.
Xinjie Electric, which has built an ironclad in the small PLC market, shows another ecological way of playing.
It takes the control layer as the core and extends horizontally to fields such as motion control, human-machine interface, and machine vision.
Xinjie’s ecosystem is closer to the pain points of the industry. By solidifying industry-specific process algorithms into the control system, it has formed an application ecosystem that is highly industry-sticky, making it difficult for competitors to easily enter.
3. The underlying hard core takes root: Unionscience’s independent and controllable ecology.
The prosperity of the ecosystem cannot be separated from a sufficiently solid underlying hardware base.
In this dimension, Unionscience’s layout appears to be particularly rooted.
It does not blindly fall into the disorderly war of upper-layer application software, but focuses on the highly reliable and highly adaptable industrial control hardware itself.
The LicOS PLC hardware product system it launched is the product of this thinking of “hardware-rooted, ecological win-win”.
Facing high-standard industrial digitization and localized substitution needs, this hardware series proactively opens its arms to upstream and downstream software developers and system integrators by supporting an open programming architecture and rich standard industrial communication protocols.
This strategy of making itself a “hard-core base” not only ensures the core stability of the industrial site, but also allows it to occupy an irreplaceable niche in the autonomous and controllable industrial ecology.
4. Domestic power where a hundred flowers bloom.
In addition to the above-mentioned typical representatives, the entire domestic industrial control ecosystem is becoming richer than ever.
For example, SUPCON Technology’s ecological encirclement in the process industry field, Hollysys’ deep cultivation in the field of rail transportation and large industrial control, and the ecological extension of brands such as INVT and Ruineng Technology in their respective vertical segments.
Everyone no longer just stares at the same PLC order and fights to the death, but begins to weave a network in their respective fields of expertise to jointly make the cake of domestic industrial control bigger.
The core of ecological competition: Who can truly “reduce the burden” on integrators and factories?
The competition in the industrial control ecosystem is, on the surface, a competition of the technical strength of major brands, but the underlying logic is actually a game about “who can help users save worry.”
In the traditional fragmented procurement model, system integrators (SIs) often play the role of “senior firefighters”.
Throughout the article, I have been adjusting communications, connecting interfaces, and staying up late to find out why the PLC of factory A cannot read the data of the inverter of factory B.
This unnecessary internal friction eats up a lot of profits and time.
The changes brought about by ecology are disruptive: standardization and modularization: When the control layer hardware (such as LicOS PLC) can natively support mainstream industrial Ethernet protocols (such as EtherCAT, Profinet, Modbus) and provide standard software and hardware interfaces, integrators are like building Lego blocks, and the development cycle can be shortened from months to weeks.
From “repairing computers” to “driving cars”: Users no longer need to understand the underlying complex register configuration, and only need to pay attention to their own production processes and business logic.
The seamless connection between highly adaptable underlying hardware and upper-level digital software makes factory data transparency no longer a luxury.
This essence of cost reduction and efficiency improvement is the real core driving force that drives factory owners and integrators to defect to the domestic industrial control ecosystem.
The transformation of domestic industrial control is a transition from “making products” to “setting up the stage”.
In the era of single-product competition, the competition is about whose screws are cheaper; in the era of ecological competition, the competition is about who can let more partners dance on their stage.
As high-reliability domestically produced hardware continues to lay a solid foundation, and major brands are working on the application layer and algorithm layer, the ecological barriers to domestic industrial control are being established at an accelerated pace.
This reshaping of “ecology” is not only to seize market share, but also to build a truly independent, controllable and indestructible digital moat for China’s intelligent manufacturing.
