Official sources in Chongzuo, Guangxi reported on August 19 that the city, leveraging its geographical strengths and resource advantages, has been concentrating on copper, rare earth, manganese, and other metal new materials sectors in recent years. Through multiple initiatives including leading enterprise support, supply chain enhancement, intelligent transformation, and green development, the industry is progressing from basic raw material supply to deep processing and end-use applications. This industrial cluster effect continues to strengthen as the city strives toward its goal of a 100-billion-yuan industrial cluster.

At the anode furnace casting workshop of Guangxi Nanguo Copper Co., Ltd., the production scene showcases remarkable intelligence and efficiency. After molten copper is cast and cooled into anode plates, unmanned rail-guided vehicles automatically transport them to a smart warehouse, achieving fully automated operations. According to company sources, Nanguo Copper employs a triple-furnace smelting technology combining oxygen-enriched side blowing, multi-lance top blowing, and anode furnace refining. This world-advanced copper smelting technique offers strong raw material adaptability, low energy consumption, and high operational efficiency, with an annual production capacity exceeding 700,000 tons. The parent company, Nanfang Nonferrous Metals Group, has operated in the nonferrous metals sector for over three decades, utilizing Guangxi's border and coastal advantages to coordinate domestic and international raw material markets and establish a comprehensive global trading system.

Addressing traditional industry challenges such as reliance on manual experience, difficult equipment fault prediction, and scattered energy management, Nanguo Copper has completed its digital technology transformation. According to Deputy General Manager Fu Xiaoguang, the company developed the first industrial large model in Guangxi's nonferrous metals industry, the "AI Smelting Brain," establishing a four-layer digital architecture with three major systems for process optimization, predictive equipment maintenance, and full-process energy management. The deployment of intelligent unmanned cranes, online intelligent inspection, and unmanned weighbridges has broken down data silos across workshops, creating a digital twin smart factory that shifts production from human experience-driven to data intelligence-driven operations.

Green and low-carbon development characterizes the metal new materials industry's growth in Chongzuo. Nanguo Copper exemplifies this with a green manufacturing system featuring full-process ultra-low emissions, zero-discharge wastewater recycling, and comprehensive waste heat recovery. The factory grounds feature lush greenery and clean roads, with complete flue gas recovery for acid production, smelting solid waste supplied to building materials producers, and closed-loop wastewater reuse. This fundamentally challenges conventional perceptions of polluting smelting operations.

Behind this high-quality industrial development lies precise support from local government. Li Tao, director of the Chongzuo Airport Economic Zone Collaborative Management Committee and China-ASEAN Nanning Airport Fusui Economic Zone Management Office, explained that with Nanguo Copper as the chain-leading enterprise, the city has successfully attracted 25 industrial chain projects including Chuanheng's "copper-sulfur-phosphorus-fluorine" and Wanxiang Copper, forming a ten-billion-yuan industrial chain. Based on supporting needs of four major pillar industries, the city has developed an investment attraction roadmap targeting projects that strengthen, enhance, and extend the chain to address development shortcomings.

Furthermore, driven by the leading enterprise's influence, Chongzuo continues to improve the metal new materials industry ecosystem by connecting critical chain segments, enhancing supporting systems, and promoting chain value addition and cluster growth. Nanguo Copper has brought 34 copper deep-processing enterprises into Chongzuo's China-ASEAN Youth Industrial Park, extending high-value-added product lines including copper foil, precision copper strips, and fine phosphorus chemicals. Together with multiple supporting enterprises, this creates a complete "smelting-deep processing-end application" industrial system that sustains thousands of jobs.

After years of development, Chongzuo's metal new materials industry now showcases increasingly prominent advantages in location, resources, and production capacity. With annual electrolytic copper production capacity of 700,000 tons, ranking first in Guangxi, the city also boasts the world's most diverse manganese product line and the most concentrated ion-adsorption rare earth separation production line globally, with related core technologies reaching world-leading levels. Data shows that from January to July this year, 53 metal materials enterprises above designated size in Chongzuo achieved cumulative industrial output value of 42.447 billion yuan, up 36.9 percent year-on-year. Moving forward, the city will continue leveraging leading enterprises to drive the metal new materials industry toward high-end, intelligent, and green transformation and upgrading.