Transformers and robot export orders are booming! China's manufacturing competitiveness overseas continues to be prominently demonstrated.

Sourced from: CCTV Finance

Customs latest released data: In the first two months of this year, China’s export value was $656.58 billion, up 21.8% year over year. Among them, electromechanical products such as transformers and robots performed especially strongly, with exports reaching $410.91 billion, setting a record high for the same period in previous years, up 27.1% year over year. What hard-core strengths are behind the high growth in exports of electromechanical products?

At a transformer manufacturing enterprise in Changzhou, Jiangsu, this transformer, which is set to be shipped for export to Brazil, is about to complete a crucial pre-shipment step—the temperature-rise test.

A Brazilian customer has ordered a total of 5 transformers; currently, the company can only deliver 3, and the remaining orders need to wait until June to be completed. Since last year, the company’s colleagues handling international business have kicked off a global “fly-in/fly-out” mode.

In 2025, the total value of export orders for China’s transformer enterprises reached a record 64.6 billion yuan, up nearly 36% from the previous year. The main reason is the massive power demand brought about by the development of artificial intelligence. At present, the power load of an ultra-large AI data center has exceeded 1 gigawatt (1GW), equivalent to the summer peak electricity demand of a mid-sized city. In addition, some countries and regions’ transformer equipment has reached the time for replacement and upgrades, and the combination of these factors has driven a booming overseas demand for transformers.

The transformers produced by this company are sold to more than 60 countries and regions worldwide. In 2026, as of now, export orders are up 20% year over year.

Changzhou, Jiangsu, is known as the “world’s capital of transformers.” In the first two months of 2026, the city’s transformer export value exceeded 650 million yuan, up more than 70%. Order growth is driving faster momentum across the entire industrial chain, with supporting companies producing transformer cooling fins and silicon steel sheets running at full capacity.

China has already built the world’s most complete transformer manufacturing ecosystem, with production capacity accounting for about 60% of the global total. It has formed comprehensive advantages in raw materials, costs, production cycles, and more.

The global AI wave is sweeping the world, and it can’t do without compute power, which in turn depends on a steady supply of electricity to support it. Chinese transformer companies win a steady stream of international big orders by leveraging their fast-response industrial chain, their precise-fit innovation capabilities, and their strong proven skills honed through repeated practice in large numbers of application scenarios in the domestic market. As the world’s largest robot-producing country, in 2025, China’s industrial robot exports grew 48.7% year over year, with multiple categories flourishing, including service robots, elder-care robots, and underwater robots.

In a science and technology park in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, this company focuses on developing all kinds of service robots. In addition to cleaning robots, it also has multiple categories such as food-delivery robots and customer-introduction robots. Working in more than 80 countries and regions worldwide, by the end of 2025, its cumulative shipment volume reached 120k units.

Engineers are fitting wheels onto a four-pawed robot dog, aiming to help it move faster and more steadily across complex terrains such as sand and ravines. This robot dog is made up of more than 30,000 parts and is still being continuously iterated and upgraded. This year, it is expected to ship nearly 10,000 units.

At present, Shenzhen’s robot industry cluster has more than 74k enterprises. The total industrial chain output value exceeds 200 billion yuan, and about half of the component parts can be sourced and matched within 10 kilometers, while 80% of the parts have suppliers within a radius of 40 kilometers.

Shenzhen has proposed speeding up the construction of a global AI pioneer city. The goal is that in 2026, the added value of the AI industrial cluster will grow by 10% or more. According to customs statistics: In the first two months of this year, the total value of China’s goods trade import and export was 7.73 trillion yuan, up 18.3% year over year, with foreign trade achieving a strong start to the year.

This wave of Chinese manufacturing going global lets us see even more clearly: reliability, value for money, and innovation are the solid core skills that enable Chinese companies to go into battle and ride out storms in their overseas expansion. We look forward to more Chinese-made and Chinese-created products being forged into even more hard-core real capabilities and more outstanding high quality during the wave of going global—so that China’s manufacturing and China’s creation shine brightly on the world’s industrial stage.

Source: CCTV Finance

Editor: Song Fang