The 2025 Lianjiang Home Appliances Autumn (Guangzhou) Expo draws many buyers from home and abroad. CHINA DAILY

Exports of small household appliances from Lianjiang city jumped 28.6 percent year-on-year in the first two months of the year to reach 200 million yuan ($29 million), according to Zhanjiang Customs. Among them, exports of electric coffee makers totaled 5.08 million yuan, surging 91.8 percent from a year earlier.

As a county-level city under Zhanjiang in Guangdong province, Lianjiang is home to more than 1,200 small household appliance enterprises. Known as "China's electric home appliance industry base", its main products include electric rice cookers, electric kettles, electric cooking pots, air fryers, audio and video equipment and electronic pianos.

The total output value of the city's full-chain home appliance industry has exceeded 25 billion yuan. Production and sales of electric rice cookers made in Lianjiang account for about 40 percent of the national total, while electric kettles make up around 80 percent.

Benefiting from strengths in its industry chain and market access, Lianjiang's small home appliance sector has seen steady gains in export competitiveness in recent years.

Lianjiang's home appliances are now exported to more than 100 countries and regions across Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa and Oceania, with annual exports of about 1.3 billion yuan.

Lu Xizhang, president of the Lianjiang Household Appliance Industry Association, said 2024 marked a key turning point for the industry's push toward intelligentization and digital transformation.

That year, Lianjiang invested 130 million yuan to build a public service platform for the home appliance industry, bringing in resources such as national-level laboratories and the Huawei (Lianjiang) home appliance empowerment center. Taking electric rice cookers as an example, Lu said a production line that once required 20 workers can now be maintained daily by just five after intelligent upgrades.

To improve product design capabilities, the city has strengthened ties with high-quality resources in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. It has set up an industrial collaboration and innovation center in Guangzhou covering about 1,000 square meters.

The city has also enhanced overall design capacity by bringing in design experts, helping institutions and universities form the Lianjiang home appliance innovation alliance, organizing innovation and design competitions and promoting commercialization of winning works.

In 2025, Lianjiang attracted seven upstream projects in the industry chain, including thermostat and mold projects. It also encouraged leading enterprises to pursue differentiated competition and expand into six new product categories: air fryers, baby food makers, coffee machines, multifunction stoves, range hoods and gas stoves.

Li Yongyi, mayor of Zhanjiang, said in this year's government work report in February that while expanding five 100-billion-yuan industrial clusters led by "four green and one blue" industries, the city should also upgrade traditional sectors and support each county or district in developing its own specialty industries during the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30), including Lianjiang's small home appliance industry.

At a conference in March highlighting Lianjiang's high-quality development, Zeng Pingzhi, Party secretary of Lianjiang, emphasized building a "2+N" system. The "2"refers to the two core categories of electric rice cookers and electric kettles, while "N" represents a range of emerging home appliance categories covering scenarios such as dining, home furnishings and beauty care.

Foreign buyers check in to participate in a matching event during the expo. CHINA DAILY