China's mid-year economic report for 2026 highlights the nation's industrial pillars. The key drivers are equipment manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing. In the first half of the year, global demand for 3D printing equipment and lithium-ion batteries has surged, leaving factories struggling to keep up with orders.

Consumer-Grade 3D Printers: China Dominates 90% of Global Market Share, with Production and Exports Soaring

A Shenzhen-based tech company invested 240 days and millions of yuan to create a fully 3D-printed show home. All 2,000 soft furnishings inside, from small lampshades to a 1.8-meter sofa, were printed on-site using materials like resin, ceramic, and titanium alloy. This demonstrates that 3D printing has moved far beyond the limits of a "handmade toy," now covering custom home decoration and industrial precision manufacturing.

Currently, this factory operates a production line with over 30 workers, assembling one machine every two minutes. With day and night shifts running in parallel, the daily output reaches 800 units. The company runs nearly 20 such production lines, yet even with overtime, they cannot meet demand. Orders for the entire year are already fully booked, with a 30% year-on-year increase in order volume. The company is accelerating its expansion to handle the surging global market demand.

Leveraging Shenzhen's mature electronics supply chain, Chinese companies have reduced the cost of industrial 3D printing equipment, which was once hundreds of thousands of yuan per unit, to just a fraction of that. By integrating AI for one-click modeling, they have simplified the operation threshold, leading to rapid market adoption of consumer-grade 3D printers.

In the first half of 2026, China's domestic production of consumer-grade 3D printing equipment grew by 48.5% year-on-year. From January to May, 2.94 million units were exported, a 90% increase year-on-year, with an export value of 7.82 billion yuan, a rise of 106.8%. China firmly holds 90% of the global market for consumer-grade 3D printing equipment.

Energy Storage Lithium Batteries: AI Computing Drives Essential Demand, Orders Surge 30 Times in First Half

A company's battery factory in Huizhou is experiencing even more intense activity than the 3D printing sector. The R&D chief engineer noted that production in the first half was "busy to the point of smoking." On the day of a reporter's visit, the company received an urgent order worth over 100 million yuan, requiring the immediate delivery of more than 8,000 energy storage battery packs. The company's energy storage battery orders surged 30-fold in the first half of the year, a level of market demand that a 15-year veteran employee had never seen before.

The core driver of the energy storage industry's explosion is the rapid global expansion of the AI computing power sector. Data centers for large model training and inference consume enormous amounts of electricity. Power outages can easily cause computation interruptions and hardware damage, making millisecond-level energy storage backup a necessary requirement for computing power facilities. Furthermore, the power load from AI data centers fluctuates dramatically, and energy storage devices can smoothly regulate the grid load, serving as a stable foundation for new computing infrastructure.

A company executive stated that during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, total investment in the energy industry is expected to reach 20 trillion yuan, with new energy storage and computing-electricity coordination being key development directions. Relying on the "East Data West Computing" project, green power bases in the northwest, combined with energy storage equipment, can directly export computing resources, providing vast long-term growth space for the energy storage industry.

In the first half of 2026, China's national lithium-ion battery production increased by 39.3% year-on-year, with energy storage battery shipments growing by over 80%. The national plan has set a target of 300 million kilowatts for new energy storage installations by 2030, doubling the 136 million kilowatt scale at the end of 2025. "Computing-electricity coordination" has been written into the government work report for the first time, indicating a coordinated plan for computing power and electricity, and ensuring strong long-term demand for the energy storage sector.

Industry Strengthens the Economic Foundation and Drives Growth

The value-added output of equipment manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing grew by 9.3% and 13.3%, respectively. The contribution of new growth drivers to the growth of industrial enterprises above a designated size reached 47.9%, an increase of 12 percentage points compared to the full year of 2025. This indicates that the industrial structure is accelerating its shift toward the new. The production capacity explosion and packed overseas orders for high-tech products like 3D printing equipment and lithium batteries are a vivid illustration of this trend.