Transformation and Upgrading of the Wood Industry in Pizhou, Jiangsu Province: From "A Single Board" to "A Whole Home"

Source: The Paper

In the heartland of the northern Jiangsu plain, Pizhou, a county that rose to prominence due to its timber industry, is experiencing a new wave of industrial development.

Walking into the local wood processing park, the roar of machinery has replaced the sounds of axes and chisels of the past. Automated production lines are transforming logs into exquisite home furnishings. In the production workshop of Delunei Home Furnishings, workers operate imported CNC equipment, precisely cutting each board. Through technological upgrades, the current output of 50 people is equivalent to the workload of 100 people in the past. In the nearby TATA Wooden Door factory, customized production lines can quickly adjust product specifications according to customer needs.

By introducing advanced equipment, strengthening technological research and development, and cultivating independent brands, Pizhou's wood industry has successfully transformed from low-end processing to high-end manufacturing. After more than 30 years of development, Pizhou has created ecological board material production, brand furniture manufacturing, and ecological home research and development, forming a complete industrial chain, achieving a magnificent transformation from "a single board" to "a whole home".

It is necessary to both maintain the advantages of traditional industries and adapt to new market demands. As a county with a large population and a strong economy in Jiangsu Province, how has Pizhou explored new paths for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries over the past three decades? What lessons can other similar regions learn from this experience?

Industrial Stories in the Rings of the Trees

Entering Guanhu Town, Pizhou City, large trucks are parked on both sides of the Metasequoia Avenue, their bodies covered in sawdust. Workers are busy loading stacks of boards onto the trucks. "These are furniture and wood products shipped to various parts of the country," a driver told the reporter. The air is filled with the scent of wood, and the roar of machinery comes from the factories in the distance.

The millennia of shimmering waters of the Grand Canal have nurtured the genes of Pizhou's timber trade. This county-level city, located at the junction of Jiangsu and Shandong provinces, has developed into a strong industrial county with a GDP of 135.489 billion yuan (2024), occupying an important position in Jiangsu's county-level economy and serving as the "ballast" of Xuzhou's county-level economy.

Pizhou's ecological home furnishing industry is mainly concentrated in Guanhu Town. Looking back to the 1980s, Guanhu Town, relying on the surrounding 1 million mu of fast-growing poplar forests, experienced booming timber trade, gradually developing into the primary log trading market in northern Jiangsu and southern Shandong. "At that time, the daily trading volume could reach 300,000 cubic meters, mainly sold to Shandong, Hebei, and other places," introduced Qiu Zong, the publicity commissioner of Guanhu Town.

In the mid-1980s, merchants shifted from purchasing logs directly in Guanhu to having Guanhu vendors deliver them directly. Due to the considerable price difference, more and more vendors in Guanhu engaged in log transportation, and logs were sold throughout the country.

With the expansion of the trading scale, shrewd Pizhou merchants discovered that processing logs into boards could yield higher profits, thus initiating the first step in industrial transformation. In 1993, Xingda Woodworking Factory in Xiaofangshang Village was established, which peeled logs into veneer and sold them to places like Jiashan, Zhejiang, marking the transformation of Pizhou's timber industry from pure trade to processing and manufacturing.

This development model of "one person leading a group, and one group leading a village" quickly created a cluster effect in Guanhu Town. In 1995, Xinhua Village alone had more than 300 veneer enterprises, with an annual output value of nearly 1.5 billion yuan, and an average annual income of over 60,000 yuan per employee. Xinhua Village also became the main place for surplus laborers and even some elderly people in the area to work and earn money.

From 2000 to 2007, was the golden period for the booming development of the deep processing industry of boards in Guanhu Town. Enterprises in all villages of the town emerged like mushrooms after a spring rain. "During the peak period, you could see dried veneer everywhere in the town," Qiu Zong recalled. "Every morning, the streets were filled with trading vehicles, and the daily transaction volume exceeded 10 million yuan." With continuous improvement in product quality and expansion of production scale, Pizhou's board products were exported to countries and regions such as South Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. The saying "Jiangsu's wood industry looks to Pizhou, and Pizhou's wood industry looks to Guanhu" vividly illustrates Guanhu's special position in the national wood industry.

To a certain extent, the development process of Pizhou's timber industry, from nothing to something, from small to large, is a vivid epitome of the rise of characteristic county-level industries in China after the reform and opening up. From the initial gathering and distribution of raw materials to primary processing and now intelligent manufacturing, this path of transformation and upgrading vividly interprets the inherent logic of "industrial evolution".

Today, Pizhou has proposed the goal of transforming from "a single board" to "a whole home." The former primary wood processing factories have also been upgraded to the ecological home furnishing industry, becoming the industry with the largest number of above-scale enterprises among the six major leading industries, with 208 above-scale enterprises.

In 2024, Pizhou's ecological home furnishing industry achieved an output value of 12.547 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.41%, and from January to April this year, industrial output value reached 4.238 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18.78%.

Cross-Industry Chain

After experiencing a period of rapid expansion, Pizhou's board industry began to face growing pains, and various problems and challenges emerged. For example, the industrial cluster was extensive, the product structure was single, the industrial chain was incomplete, the equipment level was low, there was homogeneous competition, product brands were not well-known, and enterprise profits were not high.

Faced with this situation, transformation and upgrading is no longer a choice, but a must.

The curtain of transformation was opened in 2006. Qiu Zong told the reporter that in order to extend the board industry chain and develop high-end board furniture, that year, the main leaders of the Guanhu Town Party Committee led the town's industrial investment promotion team to Shenzhen to hold investment promotion talks, attracting the well-known domestic enterprise Jin Feng Huang Furniture Group to settle in Guanhu, investing 580 million yuan to build a furniture production base in Jin Feng Huang Industrial Park, which was completed and put into operation in 2008. This not only filled the gap in high-end furniture manufacturing in Pizhou, but also acted as a shot in the arm, activating the transformation momentum of local enterprises. After 2010, large enterprises such as Shenghe, Fuxiang, Tiande, Qianshan, and Muzhongwang successively switched production or added furniture production, and quickly opened up the domestic market.

The pace of transformation accelerated again in 2015. Taking advantage of the industrial transformation in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Guanhu Town signed settlement agreements with 24 enterprises, including the Beijing-style Alliance. This industrial alliance, known for its strict entry standards, brought more than 20 well-known brands such as TATA Wooden Doors and Huari Furniture, enabling a qualitative leap in Pizhou's home furnishing industry.

Reporters entered the TATA wood door intelligent production workshop, and what appeared before them was a complete modern production line. Starting from the raw material area, the intelligent warehousing system automatically retrieves the plate raw materials, and the CNC panel saw completes the cutting with an accuracy of 0.1 mm. The robotic arm sends the cut plates to the processing center, where key parts such as keyholes and hinge grooves can be precisely processed within 1 minute. Moving to the assembly line, the intelligent conveyor belt accurately connects the door leaf and door frame, and workers quickly complete the assembly using electric tools. "Each door has a QR code, and the system will read the production requirements on the QR code, so it can be said that each door is customized." Cheng Kuan, the production manager of TATA wood doors, introduced.

With the continuous entry of leading enterprises, Pizhou's home furnishing industry has gradually built a complete ecological chain: upstream, Landis and Yilusen provide high-quality base materials; midstream, TATA and Delune focus on customized production; downstream, Fumanmen and Xitianyong cover the full range of terminal markets; and supporting companies such as Osbern and Yuanfeng Packaging improve the industry's service capabilities.

This "one industry, five chains" cluster effect not only significantly reduces the procurement and logistics costs of enterprises, but also promotes the overall improvement of the industry's level through technological spillover. "The demonstration effect of leading enterprises has exceeded expectations." A relevant person in charge of the Pizhou Economic Development Bureau said, "They have not only brought advanced technologies and management experience, but more importantly, they have reshaped the development thinking of local enterprises."

The transformation and upgrading of traditional industries is not simply an equipment update, but a profound transformation involving the reconstruction of the industrial ecosystem. Pizhou is currently at a new starting point for development, and promoting the construction of intelligent factories will become a key breakthrough for industrial advancement. By deeply integrating industrial internet, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence and other new generation information technologies, it will achieve a qualitative leap from traditional "manufacturing" to modern "intelligent manufacturing."

From "Manufacturing" to "Intelligent Manufacturing"

At the Pizhou Qiannian Zhou Wood Industry production plant, logs from North America, Europe, and other places are neatly stacked in the storage area. Entering the spacious and bright workshop, the German fully automatic production line is operating efficiently: intelligent robotic arms grasp the plates with millimeter-level precision, and the CNC cutting center uses laser positioning to achieve 0.1 mm precision processing. Each process achieves precise digital control. In the control room, engineers are intently monitoring the real-time production data jumping on the electronic screen, from raw material consumption to product qualification rate, every key indicator is under control.

In recent years, the local area has taken "intelligence, greenness, and integration" as its transformation direction, and has built a complete industrial ecological chain through technological innovation, process innovation and upgrading, and product innovation and iteration. On the one hand, it strongly supports the intelligent transformation of existing enterprises, such as Delune Home's MES system, which monitors the production process in real time, combined with SPC quality control, which increases the product's first-pass yield to 98%; on the other hand, it promotes the collaborative development of the industrial chain, and Osbern's environmentally friendly plates are directly supplied to downstream enterprises, realizing "in-park circulation."

Delune Smart Home Receives "Provincial Intelligent Manufacturing Workshop" Certification

In the wave of transformation, a group of benchmark enterprises have emerged: for example, Delune Smart Home has not only successfully obtained the title of "Jiangsu Provincial Green Factory," but has also become one of the few enterprises in the industry to obtain "Provincial Intelligent Manufacturing Workshop" certification.

From a small workshop selling raw wood to a leading enterprise in intelligent customized home furnishings, Delune's transformation is particularly typical. In the company's intelligent production workshop, the comprehensive application of intelligent production lines means that this workshop, which once required hundreds of workers, now only needs 50 skilled workers to operate efficiently. "Production efficiency has doubled, and product precision has reached the industry-leading level." The production manager of Jiangsu Delune Intelligent Home Furnishing Co., Ltd. introduced.

This Industry 4.0 intelligent production line, which cost 120 million yuan to build, imported a fully automatic pressing system from Germany, and with the company's self-developed intelligent warehousing and logistics system, it has achieved fully automated intelligent operation from raw material processing to finished product packaging. Delune's production capacity has increased by 40%, production costs have been reduced by 10%, order delivery cycles have been shortened by 25%, and the error rate has also dropped significantly by 90%, realizing seamless docking and efficient circulation of industrial chain collaborative development and production and sales data.

The once bustling and cluttered labor-intensive workshops are now well-organized, replaced by the rhythmic hum of precisely operating robotic arms. To meet the needs of high-end customization, the company has successively introduced the Cool Home AI design system, allowing customers to complete the entire process from scheme design to production customization through a mobile phone APP, truly realizing the "what you want is what you get" intelligent home experience.

After more than 30 years of development, Pizhou has created a complete industrial chain integrating ecological board production, brand furniture manufacturing, and ecological home research and development.

This transformation is a vivid portrayal of the transformation and upgrading of Pizhou's traditional wood industry. Pizhou's successful practice provides a vivid sample for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries. Through the dual-drive of "technological innovation + industrial chain collaboration," it promotes the wood industry to advance to the high end of the value chain. Facts have proved that as long as the right path is found, traditional industries can also be rejuvenated.

Today, Pizhou is focusing on the layout of cutting-edge fields such as smart homes. From the initial wood trading to today's smart home manufacturing, this "wood" is still continuing to write more flavorful "growth rings."

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