World’s First TCM Lighthouse Factory Unveiled at Sinopharm Taiji’s Fuling Pharmaceutical Plant

According to Xinhua News Agency, the World Economic Forum released the roster for the 16th cohort of the Global Lighthouse Factory Network on 22 June during its 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions. The Fuling Pharmaceutical Plant run by Sinopharm Taiji, a subsidiary under Sinopharm Group, has secured a place on the list and become the world’s first industrial Lighthouse Factory dedicated to traditional Chinese medicine production.

Lighthouse Factory status is awarded exclusively by the World Economic Forum to production facilities that set the global benchmark for smart manufacturing, digital transformation and sustainable green production across all manufacturing sectors. The designation has long remained absent from the traditional Chinese medicine industrial segment, and the plant’s admission fills this gap entirely. It also marks the formal arrival of modernised TCM manufacturing on the mainstream global stage for intelligent production.

The Lidu oral liquid formulation workshop located in Zone A of Taiji Medical City serves as the core production zone of the Fuling Pharmaceutical Plant. The facility has built out a fully digitalised system covering the complete workflow of TCM raw material pre-processing, extraction and concentration, plus finished formulation manufacturing. Its annual output capacity stands at 100 million bottles of syrup preparations and 3 billion tubes of oral liquid formulations.

Zone A of Taiji Medical City houses twelve fully automatic high-speed filling production lines alongside fifteen matching automated packaging lines for oral liquid products. Zone B focuses on upstream TCM processing workflows including raw material treatment, extraction, concentration and alcohol refining. Centralised process control, intelligent production scheduling, full lifecycle quality traceability and lean manufacturing systems operate across all production lines within Zone B. Taiji Huoxiang Zhengqi Oral Liquid is the flagship product manufactured through the plant’s full suite of intelligent production workflows.

Sinopharm Group will roll out deeper integration of artificial intelligence, big data and other cutting-edge digital technologies across all TCM manufacturing workflows in the period ahead. A tiered cultivation framework for smart TCM production facilities will be fully established, while replicable and scalable operational models for digitalised TCM manufacturing will be systematically compiled and documented. All such measures will drive steady improvements in the quality of the TCM industrial sector and unlock fresh momentum for the whole traditional Chinese medicine industry.

Global manufacturing stakeholders across pharmaceuticals, chemicals and consumer goods are tracking operational progress at the newly accredited TCM Lighthouse Factory. Digital transformation frameworks trialled at the Fuling site will offer actionable blueprints for herbal medicine manufacturers worldwide to advance automated, data-driven and low-carbon production models.