Guangzhou serves as a national advanced manufacturing base and a key carrier of an international science and technology innovation center. By the end of 2025, the city had cumulatively cultivated 482 national-level "little giant" enterprises specializing in niche sectors with cutting-edge technologies, 35 national-level manufacturing single-item champions, and 6 enterprises listed in the Fortune Global 500. Recently, reporters visited multiple enterprises and production frontlines in Guangzhou as part of a quality-driven supply chain enhancement research tour. From a single chip and a mass spectrometer to a circuit board and a power grid, quality is no longer merely an inspection before leaving the factory—it is integrated into the entire process of design, manufacturing, supply chain, standards, and application, becoming a critical engine driving high-quality development for enterprises and even entire industries.

Quality Is Designed and Manufactured, Not Inspected

Guangzhou CanSemi Technology Inc. is a nationally recognized high-tech enterprise born from Guangdong Province's indigenous innovation efforts, and it is also a 12-inch wafer manufacturing enterprise in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area that has fully entered mass production. "CanSemi does wafer foundry work, and our clients are all professional chip design companies with extremely demanding quality requirements. We emphasize that 'quality is designed and manufactured, not inspected,' and we involve the quality team from the product definition stage rather than waiting until everything is done to pick out problems," a CanSemi representative told reporters. At CanSemi, the quality responsibility system penetrates down to work teams and process steps. The company has established a chief quality officer system, with senior leadership directly spearheading quality work. At the product definition stage, the quality team intervenes early; customer quality requirements are "translated" into internal process specifications and inspection standards, with internal control standards typically one notch stricter than customer requirements. Semiconductor manufacturing involves thousands of process steps. CanSemi has built a quality management data platform covering the entire workflow, with real-time collection of key process parameters, equipment status, and inspection data. Once SPC statistical process control detects data drift, the system automatically issues alerts; from material input to factory shipment, full-process quality traceability enables rapid reverse lookup of equipment, batches, and parameter ranges. The company has also established a defect management system that encourages "exposing problems," driving closed-loop corrective and preventive actions through the PDCA cycle. By the end of 2025, CanSemi's cumulative 12-inch wafer shipments exceeded 1.8 million units, serving more than 100 clients. Quality-driven supply chain enhancement is translating into market trust.

High-end instruments are also a concentrated manifestation of quality capabilities. In the field of mass spectrometers, Guangzhou Hexin Instrument Co., Ltd. has independently tackled core mass spectrometry components including time-of-flight mass analyzers, quadrupole mass analyzers, ion sources, ion transmission components, high-voltage pulse power supplies, and differential vacuum systems, driving breakthroughs in domestic precision machining, vacuum, radio frequency power supply, and special metal coating supply chains. To increase the localization rate, Hexin continuously optimizes core components and process iterations, establishes rigorous aging, high-low temperature, vibration, and long-duration continuous operation verification systems, and collaborates with monitoring stations, research institutes, and third-party testing agencies to conduct methodological validation, promoting the inclusion of domestic instruments in relevant testing standards and method specifications. In supply chain quality management, the company conducts joint research and development and quality access with domestic component suppliers, establishes a tiered supplier evaluation system, and stabilizes batch consistency of domestic components. Quality breakthroughs are gradually translating into the confidence for domestic substitution.

Chain Leader Traction: Turning Quality Capabilities into Public Goods for the Industrial Chain

The hardest part of quality-driven supply chain enhancement lies not with a single enterprise but in the coordination of the entire chain. A prominent change on Guangzhou's industrial frontline is that leading enterprises are moving from their own quality management toward driving quality linkage improvement across the entire supply chain. Guangzhou Shiyuan Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. focuses on interactive display and artificial intelligence as its core businesses. In the production process, Shiyuan embeds AI into quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement: AI FMEA assists design reviews, quality warning agents conduct real-time SPC monitoring, AI optical inspection improves main control board testing precision, and quality diagnostic agents connect production systems to shorten the cycle from problem analysis to improvement implementation. Quality-driven supply chain enhancement emphasizes sharing. The laboratory invested in and built by Shiyuan has obtained CNAS accreditation and was opened as Guangzhou Jingce, providing testing and certification services to more than 670 supply chain enterprises, transforming quality infrastructure from an enterprise-exclusive asset into an industrial public good. As the "dual chain leader" of Guangdong Province's ultra-high-definition video display and Shaanxi Province's new display key industrial chains, Shiyuan collaborates with upstream and downstream enterprises to research needs, define division of labor, and jointly build infrastructure, driving a 40% improvement in overall delivery efficiency across the supply chain. The ultra-high-definition video display industrial cluster in Huangpu District, Guangzhou, is advancing toward becoming a world-class advanced manufacturing cluster.

The practices of China Southern Power Grid EHV Power Transmission Company extend the quality chain to energy security. The company has iteratively formed a "dual-chain integration quality management model driven by 'zero defects,'" embedding the "zero defects" concept throughout planning, design, construction, commissioning, acceptance, and operations and maintenance. From a 400-ton transformer to a millimeter-level bolt, not a single defect is overlooked. By collaborating with supply chain enterprises to build innovation consortia, China Southern Power Grid's direct current transmission has achieved 100% localization across the entire chain of "complete equipment—components—raw materials," with DC energy availability reaching world-leading levels for 15 consecutive years. The 24,000 kilometers of transmission lines, 46 converter stations and substations under China Southern Power Grid's jurisdiction extensively deploy inspection robots, power drones, and AI early warning systems, with intelligent operations and maintenance greatly improving defect detection and disposal efficiency. Quality-driven supply chain enhancement relies both on enterprises honing their internal strengths and on government-enterprise collaboration and public service support. In recent years, Guangdong Province has implemented the Outline for Building a Quality-Powerful Nation and the action plans for quality-driven supply chain and quality-driven enterprise enhancement, selecting "chain leader" enterprises for focused cultivation. Guangzhou has implemented a corporate chief quality officer system and introduced a series of policies providing sustained support for "one-stop" quality infrastructure and the layout of Greater Bay Area measurement and testing platforms. From a single chip to a power grid, from an instrument to a circuit board, quality is becoming a solid foundation for Guangzhou's manufacturing industry to achieve high-quality development. Quality-driven supply chain enhancement has no endpoint. Only by embedding the quality concept into every process step, every enterprise in the chain, and every standard can high-quality development have more solid support.