Hanover fair sees strong participation of Chinese companies

German trade fair Hanover Messe, one of the biggest trade fairs worldwide covering all areas of industrial technology, went digital this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic and saw a strong participation of Chinese companies.

"We are delighted to see strong participation of China," Jochen Koeckler, chairman of the management board of Deutsche Messe AG Hanover, organizer of the fair, told Xinhua on Thursday.

The fair, which ran from Monday to Friday, attracted 84 companies from Chinese mainland, including both fast growing companies and established global tech giants such as Huawei, which is focusing on accelerating industrial transformation through establishing 5G enabled wireless machines and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

"Chinese exhibitors display almost 1,000 products in the EXPO area. Also, China enriched the conference program with a sequence on Tuesday's program and created more interest in the Chinese market," Koeckler said.

During the digital event, Yi Ren, vice president of marketing and overseas sales at China's robot designer and manufacturer Elite Robot Co., Ltd., talked about current trends in the Chinese industry and to what extent the fourth industrial revolution was changing the country's manufacturing sectors.

Already, many Chinese companies are embracing the application of smart solutions, he said.

Inspur, headquartered in Jinan in east China's Shandong Province, for instance, has become one of the leading global companies for software and hardware after producing its first microcomputer in 1983. At the Hanover Messe, the Chinese company presented its intelligent computing solution to protecting biodiversity by using AI to monitor wildlife animals like the Asian elephant.

Sustainability is also at the heart of Shanghai Electric Group Co., Ltd. The worldwide acting group sees industry 4.0 as a symbiosis of smart machines, intelligent supply chains and industrial internet. At the fair, the company not only displayed new clean power equipment but also intelligent applications for power distribution and automatic production lines.

Yuanda Robotics, a company founded by German engineers and the Shenyang Yuanda Aluminum Industry Group which developed an advanced collaborative robot, or cobot, told Xinhua on Friday that despite being online, Hanover Messe was "still something special and the right place" for the young company to show its smart industrial assistant Yu.