About

China International Marine Containers (Group) is one of the first container manufacturers and Sino-foreign joint ventures in China. Founded in 1980, it manufactures and supplies containers, trailers, tank and airport equipment. It has over 100 subsidiaries and 47,000 staff across China, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia and has been listed in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 1994.

Awards

Qingdao, CN - Lighthouse award in Productivity

Jun 2026

The plant builds reefer and insulated shipping containers in a market where monthly demand swings by more than 98% and customers order from a catalogue of over 50,000 SKUs. To deliver fast in surges and run lean in downturns, the site had to compress a long, manual order-to-production cycle and tighten control of skill-dependent processes such as foaming, painting and drying. It built an integrated lean-digital-AI operating system, layering a multi-agent scheduling engine, generative-AI process design, and process-specific large models with closed-loop control onto its existing MES and ERP backbone. Over two years manufacturing lead time fell 31.7%, unit conversion cost 24.3%, the final defect rate 47%, and unit Scope 1 and 2 emissions 35.5%, while output per worker rose 69.3%.