Yang Wei, CEO of Shanghai Kuicang Intelligent Technology Co., LTD., member of Shanghai Young Entrepreneurs Association
Serving nearly 1000 enterprises in more than 50 industries in more than 20 countries around the world, maintaining 200%-300% growth rate of business scale every year, the cumulative sales of more than 22,000 units, in the world has obtained and applied for more than 400 patents, more than 50% of which are invention patents, in December 2021, ranked in the Hurun "Global Unicorn list"...... Kuicang Intelligence is leading the way in the $100 billion race of autonomous mobile robots (AMR).
But what was the first prototype of Kuaikan Intelligence like?
It's hard to imagine that the first prototype was built by taking tens of thousands of wheels and other parts from other devices, including batteries from my own electric car, and piecing them together.
First prototype machine
All things are difficult before they are easy. In 2014, Kuicang Intelligence was established in Shanghai. The first and most important problem we faced was to achieve the leap from 0 to 1. It can be said that before the establishment of Kuicang intelligence, the domestic mobile robot industry is still a "blank", there is no previous experience to follow, there is no upstream and downstream industry support, the corresponding talent is not ready, customers and the market are not ready.
Luckily, we chose Shanghai.
Our industry is "can't rush", it has an objective research and development cycle, need to calm down, calm down, to experiment, iteration. Shanghai has given us an inclusive and open entrepreneurial environment, enough time and space for growth, and the confidence and confidence to work hard to the end.
From the perspective of industrial environment, Shanghai has a large base of manufacturing enterprises and actively layout intelligent manufacturing. There are more than 6000 manufacturing enterprises in total. Focusing on high value-added products and building intelligent factories has become the mainstream development trend of these enterprises. At the same time, the integration of the Yangtze River Delta allows the upstream and downstream industries to play a supporting agglomeration effect, which provides an excellent growth soil for the development of the mobile robot industry.
Starting from 2020, Shanghai will implement the "100+ Smart Factory Special action plan", which plans to complete the construction of 100 smart factories, create 10 benchmarking smart factories, cultivate 10 industry first-class intelligent manufacturing system integrators, and build 10 vertical industry industrial Internet platforms within 3 years. Statistics show that in the past two years, the construction of smart factories in Shanghai is taking a commanding position -- the density of robots in key industries in Shanghai has reached 383 per 10,000 workers, 1.5 times the national average. This is undoubtedly our high - speed growth into a strong booster agent.
From the perspective of policy support, Shanghai's support for science and technology innovation enterprises is both comprehensive and innovative, helping us to solve the needs of people, land, financial and other aspects. Up to now, 10 high-tech talents have successfully settled in Shanghai, which has also become an important advantage for us to attract and retain technical backbone.
In 2020, with the support of governments at all levels, is located in baoshan district of Shanghai's "fast industrialization base warehouse global intelligent robot" construction, the base project planning area of about 90000 square meters, the main function for technology research and development and validation scenario, on the one hand, on the mobile robot using cutting-edge technology to new technology out of the lab, On the one hand, it verifies the efficiency and reliability of new mobile robot products in the business scenario, which will help Kuaicang intelligent and the whole industrial chain enterprises to form interactive cooperation and jointly make China's intelligent robot industry bigger and stronger.
A large amount of research and development investment, so that robot companies need sufficient cash flow, but because they are asset-light enterprises, there is no collateral, it is not easy to get loans from banks. In fast warehouse intelligence to further expand the scale of development, set by the government department, the construction bank of China Shanghai branch testing the waters "TouDai linkage" take the initiative to find you, unsecured, low interest loans, and partial entered the company, the construction bank, trust company equity investment fund for the development of intelligent fast storehouse injected with financial living water.
After 8 years of development, Kuapang Intelligence has now become a global leader in the AMR industry.
In the application of pharmaceutical circulation scenario, the market share of express warehouse intelligence is more than 50%, and the highest repurchase times are 6 times. In 3PL (third party logistics) industry, a single order over 100 million yuan; In the e-commerce industry, the earliest project is more than 7 years old, and the largest project has 1,000 units per warehouse. In the automobile industry, from the flow of spare parts to vehicle manufacturing, the warehouse intelligent to provide multiple types of products; In the garment industry, it not only boosts the upgrade of warehouse, but also changes the production mode of manufacturing workshop; In the photovoltaic industry, for the mobile robot industry ice-breaking difficult production process projects; In the lithium electric industry, "Kunpeng" special aircraft, latent type and forklift type can cover the whole process; In the PCB (printed circuit board) industry, "White Ze" special plane, one machine multi-ability, easy to deal with multiple scenarios...
As the application scenarios continue to expand, we need to know our customers better than our customers. Kuaicang Intelligence is one of the few mobile robot enterprises in the world to realize the mature application of e-commerce, circulation and manufacturing. According to the needs of different industries, we continue to innovate and develop mobile robot products such as latent type, material box type, forklift type, industrial special aircraft, etc. We also create Quickbin, a two-machine collaboration solution of material box type and latent type with double efficiency and half cost, which has obtained Chinese invention patent and German CE certification.
We also know that prosperity will always be a minority.
In the first half of this year, a sudden epidemic caught people by surprise. Our research and development, production, operation and maintenance and other aspects have encountered considerable challenges. Difficulties are often in, but confidence can give people more strength. When transportation was locked down by the epidemic, dozens of our employees lived in the factory to ensure the continuous operation of key projects and give customers full confidence. We also use the advantages of mobile robots themselves to solve the pressing needs of the people under the epidemic. During the pandemic, our mobile robot was used in an Internet drug purchase platform to help deliver "life-saving drugs" to patients in lockdown areas in a timely manner. When residents in the lockdown area have urgent medical needs, they can place an order online and soon get the medicine delivered from the Smart Pharmacy. The smart pharmacy can sort 2,000 parcels every day, and only 6 staff are required to go on duty. With the same staffing, only 200 parcels can be sorted by manual sorting before, which fully increases the efficiency by 10 times.
Opportunities and challenges always coexist. Under the impact of the pandemic, we have taken a global view and identified opportunities in overseas markets in advance. In Europe, for example, great changes have taken place before and after the pandemic. In the past, the retail industry in Europe was mainly offline, and consumers lacked the consumption habit of e-commerce. Now they can only choose online shopping, which has forced a large number of retailers to switch to online. More importantly, to a certain extent, it has led the process of intelligent transformation of warehousing and logistics in Europe.
In the future of many uncertain, we firmly believe that Kuicang intelligence to create value for customers is certain, the demand for mobile robots in various industries is certain, firmly grasp the "certain" and constantly enlarge, is our magic weapon to win.
From the perspective of social development and market changes, with the aging of the population and the employment of young people moving to the Internet, young people are more willing to engage in relatively free and flexible jobs such as e-commerce sellers and delivery workers than to engage in repetitive and mechanical jobs such as porters in physical factories and warehouses. The more severe situation is: Now the people who are engaged in porters within 10 years belong to the overage, with their withdrawal, the enterprise will be more and more difficult to employ. And the use of mobile robot enterprises can generally save 50 to 70 percent of the labor, which will greatly ease the employment dilemma.
At the same time, the global pandemic has brought great difficulties to labor-intensive enterprises (express delivery, retail, manufacturing, etc.). It is becoming a solution for many labor-intensive enterprises to use robots to replace part of human labor and to work cooperatively through robots. This scheme can not only greatly reduce the population density in the unit space, effectively control the risk of infection, but also improve the efficiency of enterprises. When the manual is matched with the mobile robot working 24 hours non-stop, the human efficiency of the enterprise can be increased by 3 times compared with the general pure manual scheme, and up to 5-7 times in some scenes.
For Kuai Bin Intelligence, every year is the bottleneck, because we always maintain the "empty cup mentality". only keep anxiety, we can accelerate the world's storage and intelligent, industrial intelligent infrastructure, let mobile robots in factories would like blood cells to the human body, to make "within the four walls of intelligent driving - let the human no longer handling" of the dream come true, continue to Shanghai intelligent manufacturing injection youth power, bring more unicorn "born" in Shanghai.