Innovation boosts China's trade tempo

Customs data showed China's industrial robot exports exceeded imports for the first time in 2025, making the country a net exporter of industrial robots. In the first half, China's industrial robot exports reached 6.29 billion yuan, up 18.6 percent year-on-year, with products shipped to 141 countries and regions.

Industrial robots are not the only high-end Chinese-made equipment riding the AI boom, as power infrastructure hardware has also seen surging global orders.

At a workshop of Jiangsu Yawei Transformer Co in Nantong, East China's Jiangsu province, workers were racing to complete large-capacity power transformers and dry-type distribution transformers destined for countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

As power consumption per server rack at data centers has climbed from around 10 kilowatts to several hundred kWs — and in some cases even megawatt levels — reliable, high-capacity electricity supply has become critical. Once regarded as conventional grid equipment, transformers are becoming a cornerstone of AI infrastructure, said Li Luosheng, the company's manager for customs affairs.

"In the past, most of our exports were conventional transformer models," said Li. "Now, a growing proportion of our orders comes from AI data centers and overseas power grid upgrade projects, where customers place much higher demands on energy efficiency, reliability and delivery speed."

Jiangsu's exports of electrical equipment, including transformers, electrical control devices and wires and cables, reached 140.56 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, up 23.5 percent year-on-year, statistics from Nanjing Customs showed.

China's export mix has undergone a profound transformation over the past four decades. In the early years of reform and opening-up, labor-intensive products such as garments, furniture and household appliances helped Chinese manufacturers gain a foothold in global markets by leveraging competitive production costs.

With the country's industrial capabilities advancing, exports increasingly moved up the value chain, with higher-value and technology-intensive products taking a larger share.

Chen Bin, deputy director of the expert committee of the Beijing-based China Machinery Industry Federation, said the transformation has accelerated in recent years.

After electric vehicles, lithium batteries and photovoltaic products emerged as China's "new trio" of export growth drivers, a new wave of products — including industrial robots, commercial drones, 3D printers, artificial intelligence applications and innovative pharmaceuticals — is rapidly gaining global traction, said Chen.

Backed by a comprehensive industrial ecosystem, a deep engineering talent pool and sustained innovation, China's foreign trade is increasingly being driven by technological advancement rather than traditional cost advantages, he added.

The shift is already evident in China's latest trade figures. Alongside notable export growth in tech-intensive green products such as energy storage systems and electric-powered trucks, China's trade in hardware supporting computing power, including electronic components and computer parts, surged 56.6 percent year-on-year to 5.13 trillion yuan between January and June, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

Wang Jun, the administration's vice-minister, said the country's AI-powered smart glasses, translation devices and robotic exoskeletons are among a growing range of intelligent products undergoing rapid innovation.

The rising contribution of these innovation-driven products has helped underpin China's broader trade growth. The country's foreign trade expanded 16.9 percent year-on-year to 25.47 trillion yuan in the first half, with imports growing faster than exports. Exports rose 13.4 percent, while imports climbed 22.1 percent, exceeding export growth by 8.7 percentage points, according to customs data.

Pushing back against the so-called "China Shock 2.0" narrative, which portrays China's development as a disruption to the global economy, Li Jiaying, an assistant researcher at Renmin University of China's Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies in Beijing, said China's export growth is increasingly driven by innovation rather than low-cost manufacturing.