From barren land to smart factories: development resilience of copper industry in east China's Guixi

NANCHANG, March 10 (Xinhua) -- Guixi of east China's Jiangxi Province boasts the largest copper smelting base in the country. Guixi alone accounts for about 10 percent of the country's electrolytic copper output.

Currently, copper finds increasingly wide applications in both daily life and industrial production, especially in new energy vehicles and AI chip manufacturing.

Thanks to more than four decades of development, Guixi now boasts an annual copper production capacity of more than one million tonnes. Driven by an ongoing transformation towards smart operation, 12 labor-intensive steps in the smelting process have been fully automated at the smelter.