On January 15, 2026, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its latest list of global Lighthouse Factories. The 100,000-spindle green and intelligent factory of Jiangsu Yueda Textile was successfully selected, making it the world’s first Lighthouse Factory in the cotton textile industry. This marks that China’s intelligent textile manufacturing has reached the world’s top level.
With a total investment of over 1 billion yuan and a floor area of 50,000 square meters, the factory has completely abandoned the labor-intensive mode of traditional textile production, emerging as a benchmark for modern textile manufacturing featuring full-process digitalization and all-scenario intellectualization. The workshop is equipped with 432 sets of world-class digital spinning equipment, 41 industrial robots, 32 kilometers of intelligent conveying lines and AGV handling robots, achieving an overall automation rate of over 95%.
The factory has built an “industrial brain” platform with more than 500,000 data collection points, enabling real-time networking of all production elements including personnel, machinery, materials, processes and working environment. Technical staff can remotely monitor and schedule the entire production line via the central data cockpit, realizing fully automated and unattended operations. After the upgrade, production efficiency has increased by 60%, unit energy consumption dropped by 35%, and the product defect rate fell to 0.8%, greatly boosting comprehensive competitiveness.
The launch of Yueda Textile’s Lighthouse Factory is not only a breakthrough for the enterprise itself, but also a milestone for China’s textile industry in its transformation from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing. It offers a replicable “Chinese solution” for the digital transformation of traditional manufacturing worldwide and accelerates China’s transition from a major textile nation to a powerful textile country.