February 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com 6 THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM (WEF) has added 23 new industrial plants to its Global Lighthouse Network of cutting-edge manufacturing sites around the world – and 17 of the 23 are in China. None of the latest additions to the network are in Western Europe or North America, but India has three, and Vietnam, Turkey and Azerbaijan have one each. The Lighthouse network, launched in in 2018, now consists of more than 220 factories in more than 30 countries that are intended to act as benchmarks for global manufacturing. The scheme, co-founded by McKinsey, has an advisory board that includes representatives from Siemens and Schneider Electric. Based on eight years of data from the Lighthouse plants, WEF has now launched an AI-powered “industrial intelligence platform” called Lumina to help industrialists to progress from pilot plants with a lower risk. It is designed to help them to benchmark performance, prioritise investments, scale proven use cases, and avoid common pitfalls as they accelerate their industrial transformation. WEF says the launch of Lumina reflects a broader shift among manufacturers towards multi-technology deployment and data-driven decision-making. The data shows that 94% of successful industrial transformations combine multiple technologies, with AI being deployed most often, alongside IoT, the cloud and digital twins. Lighthouses that combine these technologies with workforce and sustainability initiatives outperform their peers by an average of 16% or more, the Forum adds, “demonstrating that competitiveness increasingly depends on integrating technology, talent and emissions reduction”. Lumina will evolve as new data is added from Lighthouse sites and industrial transformations. Although all of the new Lighthouse additions are in Asia, several are owned/operated by Western companies including Unilever (which has two plants in India and one in China), Schneider Electric, Ford (in Turkey), Michelin and Carl Zeiss. One of the new Chinese Lighthouse plants is Siemens’“digital native” factory in Nanjing – the company’s largest research and production centre for drives, electric motors and CNC systems outside of Germany. The 73,000m2 site has been chosen for its continuous digital transformation and AI-driven adaptive manufacturing, which has cut timeto-market by 33%. The site was designed, tested and optimised entirely virtually before a single brick was laid. “This approach not only enabled us to construct the factory faster and with outstanding cost-efficiency but also to build it under the toughest pandemic conditions,” says Cedrik Neike, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries. “By combining our global manufacturing expertise with local insight and a digital-first mindset, we continuously optimise every part of the operation, making it one of the most efficient and flexible factories in the world.” The Nanjing factory needed to overhaul its production processes to react to mounting pressures, including increasingly varied customer orders that required its production lines to be reconfigured every four weeks. Another challenge was that delivery windows had shrunk from 45 days to 10, while market demand was fluctuating. To address these challenges in what is a high-variety, low-volume manufacturing operation, Siemens deployed digital twins, modular automation, manufacturing management systems, and more than 50 AI applications. Compared to 2022, the initiative has cut lead times by 78% and time-to-market by 33%. Productivity rose by 14% by 2024, while field failures dropped by 46%, and the factory cut its direct and energy-related carbon emissions by 28%. The Nanjing plant is the fifth Siemens manufacturing site to be named a Lighthouse Factory by the WEF, following sites in Amberg, Erlangen and Fürth in Germany, as well as Chengdu in China. https://centres.weforum.org/centre-foradvanced-manufacturing-and-supplychains/lumina p The global market for AC drives was worth $24.3bn in 2023 and will reach $52.7bn by 2033 – a CAGR of 8% from 2024-2033 – according to a new report from Allied Market Research. Despite the strong growth potential, the market still faces several restraints, including high installation and integration costs (especially for SMEs), and the need for skilled professionals for installation, configuration and maintenance, according to the report. www.alliedmarketresearch.com p Teradyne Robotics, the owner of the Danish-based cobot manufacturer Universal Robots (UR) and the AMR (autonomous mobile robotics) specialist, MiR, is opening a US operations hub in Detroit, Michigan, where it will manufacture UR cobots, and possibly MiR AMRs in the future. The site will also serve as a training centre, service hub and visitor experience centre. Teradyne says that the strategic expansion reflects its commitment to operating close to its customers and meeting a growing demand in the US and the Americas. p The US-headquartered automation group AIR (Automated Industrial Robotics) has acquired the Ireland-based business, Kaon Automation. The acquisition strengthens AIR’s presence in Ireland, and expands its activities in the medical and life science markets. AIR brings together the former Totally Automated Systems (TA Systems) in the US, Modular Automation in Ireland, and Sewtec Automation in the UK, which it acquired in 2024. AIR now has 550 employees in the US, Ireland and the UK. p The University of Birmingham has inaugurated a facility for separating and recycling rare-earth magnets, intended to help to reduce the UK’s reliance on imports of rareearth metals, alloys and magnets. The recycling facility uses a “groundbreaking” hydrogen-based process developed by researchers at the University. It extracts rareearth magnets from end-of-life products without needing to disassemble them completely, transforming waste into an sustainable UK source of rare-earths that can be used to manufacture new products while reducing environmental impact, cost and supply chain risk. p Global shipments of collaborative robots (cobots) hit new lows in 2024, falling by 13.8%, defying earlier predictions that market would bottom out in 2023, according to new data from Interact Analysis. The sector has come under increasing pressure in recent years amid economic uncertainty and supply chain disruptions. However, Interact is predicting a return to a growth rate of 23.9% in 2026 – the strongest year in the forecast period to 2029. NEWS BRIEFS Siemens’ drives, motors and CNC factory in Nanjing is one of the new additions to the WEF’s Global Lighthouse Network of advanced factories n NEWS List of world’s cutting-edge plants has none in the West
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