People's Daily Reports on Kunlun Lubricant's Innovative Development of Service-Oriented Manufacturing

On October 22, People's Daily published an industrial and economic observation article titled Promoting the Innovative Development of Service-Oriented Manufacturing, reporting on the current state of development of service-oriented manufacturing in China and conducting on-site visits to three enterprises. The report selected Kunlun Lubricant as its first case, detailing its typical practices in developing service-oriented manufacturing and how it achieves multi-party win-win results within the industrial ecosystem through such development.
Policy First: Building an Upgraded Version of Service-Oriented Manufacturing
Service-oriented manufacturing is a new industrial form that is customer-demand oriented and supported by digital and intelligent technologies; through innovative optimization of production organization forms, operation and management methods and business development models, it deeply embeds services into the entire lifecycle and every link of manufacturing products, extends the industrial chain, reshapes the value chain and builds a new ecosystem, achieving integrated development of manufacturing and services. As an important measure for promoting the deep integration of advanced manufacturing and modern services, accelerating the deep integration of informatization and industrialization and speeding up the building of a modern industrial system, service-oriented manufacturing plays an important role in enhancing the value creation capacity of manufacturing and improving the quality and efficiency of manufacturing development.
Since 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with relevant departments, has issued and implemented the Special Action Guide for the Development of Service-Oriented Manufacturing and the Guiding Opinions on Further Promoting the Development of Service-Oriented Manufacturing, providing policy-level facilitation for developing service-oriented manufacturing; the 14th Five-Year Plan and the 2025 Government Work Report provide national-level strategic support for its development.
To further promote the innovative development of service-oriented manufacturing, seven departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently jointly issued the Implementation Plan for Deepening the Innovative Development of Service-Oriented Manufacturing (2025-2028), proposing seven main tasks and three special actions to deepen the innovative development of service-oriented manufacturing, striving to create an upgraded version of service-oriented manufacturing, and specifying development goals such as completing 20 standards for service-oriented manufacturing by 2028, building 50 leading brands and 100 innovation development highlands, and further strengthening its role in the high-quality development of manufacturing.
Two Transformations Creating Full-Chain Steward-Style Lubrication Services
The People's Daily report selected Kunlun Lubricant as its first case based on the deep observation that lubricants, as the blood of industry, play an important role in the high-quality development of manufacturing. Whether it is high-end equipment such as wind power, high-speed rail and data centres, or national heavy equipment such as aircraft carriers, nuclear power and rockets, or industrial products such as automobiles, ships and robots, all require lubricant products to reduce friction, cool units and extend service life. Kunlun Lubricant's service-oriented manufacturing solution, in addition to the product delivery of a barrel of oil, adds full-chain services such as testing, analysis, operation and maintenance and digital management, meeting customers' needs for cost reduction and efficiency improvement with overall lubrication solutions and also helping to accelerate the pace of building China into a manufacturing powerhouse.
In the pre-sale stage, Kunlun Lubricant helps customers streamline oil varieties through equipment lubrication diagnostics, solving problems brought about by complex oil categories, such as material inventory, tied-up capital pressure and difficulty in equipment lubrication management; in the after-sales stage, Kunlun Lubricant provides oil monitoring services, transforming the previous practice of oil changes by schedule into oil changes by quality, which can both extend oil service life and reduce unnecessary shutdowns, and can also reasonably extend equipment maintenance cycles by using the status of in-service lubricants to reflect equipment operating status; in addition, Kunlun Lubricant has deeply cultivated key industries to overcome technical difficulties, developing high-performance products that meet customer needs, playing a positive role in customers' expansion into domestic and overseas markets and bringing more possibilities for Kunlun Lubricant to enter the international high-end engineering supply chain.
Kunlun Lubricant's service-oriented manufacturing solution stems from two transformations - from selling products to providing overall lubrication solutions, and from developing lubricants to developing lubricating materials. Through developing service-oriented manufacturing, since 2022 Kunlun Lubricant has achieved comprehensive growth in the three major indicators of sales volume, revenue and profit, with profit growing 52 percent year on year in 2024. By enabling research and development personnel to engage with customers and understand equipment, so as to develop lubricating materials better matched to the market and more responsive to demand, Kunlun Lubricant will continue to improve service quality and deepen value co-creation, helping to build a multi-party win-win ecosystem, injecting new momentum and creating new advantages for service-oriented manufacturing as a new industrial form, and playing a solid role in building China into a manufacturing powerhouse.
Source: People's Daily Online, CCTV News, website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology