China is a major global manufacturer of precision mechanical components. According to third-party data, as of the end of April 2025, the total number of enterprises related to precision manufacturing in China has reached more than 87,900. Most of these are small and medium-sized enterprises, which generally face bottlenecks in improving Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), as well as systemic challenges such as difficulty in technical inheritance, high delivery pressure, and tight cost control brought by multi-variety, small-batch orders. In this report, Xinhua News Agency reporters visited Sun Hung Kai’s Suzhou factory to explore their path of technological breakthrough and value leap.
Starting Point: Building a Flexible Production Line with Fastems
Founded in 1992, Sun Hung Kai has focused on ultra-precision component manufacturing for 30 years. Its products are sold to 17 countries worldwide, covering cutting-edge fields such as medical care, aerospace, semiconductors, optics, and general industrial products. It is a deep partner of many global high-end brands.
Sun Hung Kai is a typical high-end machining enterprise with multi-variety and small-batch production. With a differentiated market positioning, it meets customers’ diverse needs through flexible and efficient production methods. In 2020, Sun Hung Kai cooperated with the multinational automation enterprise Fastems, and delivered a fully flexible production line with machine tool pallet management, material management, and tool automation in two phases. As a well-known supplier of automation solutions for multi-variety, small-batch machining in the industry, Fastems’ profound automation production concepts and rich practical cases have laid a solid foundation for the cooperation between the two parties.
Breaking Through: Flexible Automation to Address Multi-Variety and Small-Batch Challenges
The production line upgraded through flexible automation adopts intelligent scheduling, seamless production change, and continuous processing technologies to compress equipment dormancy time to the limit. Since it was put into operation in May 2021, the OEE of this production line has stably exceeded 75%. Data from the first five months of this year shows that the monthly OEE has exceeded 80% several times. The second-phase production line is equipped with a central tool library with a capacity of 1,000 tools, realizing full automation of tool delivery, tool loading, tool information transmission, tool sharing, and life management. This fundamentally eliminates the problem of machine collision or shutdown caused by human errors, realizes unmanned night shift production on the line, and can complete the simultaneous production of multiple products. Fastems has become a key fulcrum for Sun Hung Kai to achieve technical breakthroughs.
Leap: From “Product Export” to “Technology Export”
Facing the wave of enterprises going global, Sun Hung Kai is ushering in a new leap from “product export” to “technology export”. Sun Hung Kai has formulated a strategy with China as the “global technology center”. Through a cloud platform, it realizes remote operation and control of global production lines, concentrates core technical links of overseas factories, including process formulation, fixture design, program writing, and trial cutting, in China, and then outputs technical documents as a whole.
This model enables overseas factories to obtain “zero-time difference” engineering support without a large technical team, improving production efficiency and quality stability. This time, Sun Hung Kai is building a new factory in Malaysia and once again cooperating with Fastems to expand overseas production lines, continuing to provide solid technical support for Sun Hung Kai’s “global technology center” strategy.
With 30 years of unremitting efforts and the spirit of pioneering breakthroughs, through flexible automated production lines, Sun Hung Kai has not only successfully solved the efficiency and delivery problems of multi-variety and small-batch production but also built differentiated core competitiveness in the global high-end precision manufacturing field, opening up a reference path for the transformation and upgrading of precision machining enterprises.
