Since the start of the 14th Five‑Year Plan, Anhui has seized on industrial internet platforms as a core focus, guiding enterprises to build and use platforms to solidify a "digital foundation" and stimulate new quality‑and‑efficiency gains through "Internet Plus."

In Hefei, every new‑energy vehicle liquid‑cooling pump produced by Xinhu Company is labeled with a QR code. Over 20 items of information — including product specifications and quality records from the production process — are embedded in the code; scanning it allows instant lookup and traceability, a big change from the past. Liu Zhongyong, the company's deputy general manager, said, "Previously these management data forms were all on paper. If a problem occurred, tracing it was very inconvenient."

By 2025, the company's output of new‑energy vehicle liquid‑cooling pumps had reached roughly 600,000 units. Through joint development with China Telecom Anhui and leveraging the industrial internet platform's big‑data capabilities, Xinhu achieved online collection of product information, cloud storage, and on‑demand retrieval.

Addressing users' pain points is where industrial internet platforms exert their strength. Enabling enterprises to migrate to the cloud, use data, and apply intelligence — building industrial internet platforms is a key step. Since the start of the 14th Five‑Year Plan, Anhui has placed platform construction prominently at the provincial level; it has mobilized capable and established firms to cultivate a group of industry‑, regional‑, and specialty‑oriented platforms, insisting on simultaneous construction and application and promoting build‑by‑use. The Lingyang Industrial Internet Platform was Anhui's first national cross‑industry, cross‑domain platform. When it went online in 2021, industrial internet adoption nationwide was still at an early stage and many companies were cautious. The province supported platform development and accelerated data‑real‑economy integration by distributing service packages free of charge.

Huang Bin, executive dean of the Institute for Chinese Path to Modernization at Minzu University of China, said, "Considering Anhui's stage of development at the time, it was indeed a very forward‑looking move and a particularly valuable experience. Providing many service packages to small and medium enterprises allows them to enter the digital threshold at very low cost, and the generated data contributes to industry‑wide progress."

Starting from customized service packages and now focusing precisely on the energy sector and deeply integrating artificial intelligence, the Lingyang Industrial Internet Platform has released energy‑domain large models for three consecutive years. In 2025 it also launched two vertical scenario models for equipment operation & maintenance and electricity trading, achieving breakthroughs and standing out through intensive cultivation.

Xu Jiajia, president of Lingyang Industrial Internet Co., Ltd., said, "In recent years we have provided digital services to more than 40,000 small and medium manufacturing enterprises, enabling them to stop making decisions based on experience alone and instead make data‑ and intelligence‑driven decisions that are most beneficial to their businesses."

With high‑quality platform construction and efficient platform use, Anhui is accelerating the consolidation of a new‑type industrialization "digital foundation." By the end of 2025, the province had cultivated 92 key industrial internet platforms: 3 national‑level cross‑industry, cross‑domain "dual‑cross" platforms and 22 national‑level specialty platforms, ranking fifth nationwide in both counts. Key platforms connected more than 11 million devices and endpoints, hosted over 35,000 industrial models and industrial apps, and served over 500,000 enterprises. The Anhui Industrial Cloud platform utilization rate reached 69.3%, improving the province's national ranking from 4th at the start of the 14th Five‑Year Plan to 2nd by its end. The integrated IT‑industrialization development index reached 65.7, lifting Anhui's national rank from 15th to 5th over the period.

Source: Anhui News