HANGZHOU (Sept 19): The next 10 to 15 years may see manufacturing companies which fail to adopt automation and cloud technology get left behind, said Alibaba co-founder and executive chairman Jack Ma.

Ma envisioned manufacturers going beyond mass-manufacturing towards the increasingly talked-about concept of “manufacturing-on-demand” in an automated, internet-driven world, while human workers would inevitably be pushed towards the services industry.

“In the past, manufacturers relied on electricity [as the integral component], but data is the integral component for manufacturers in the future,” Ma said.

“We [used to] talk about a company producing 2,000 similar shirts [as an example]...but in the future it is about producing 2,000 totally different clothing in [the same period],” he said at his keynote address for the Alibaba’s Cloud Computing Conference 2018 here today.

“If you only rely on resources assumption, you will have a miserable time in the future...the pains [manufacturers’ are going to face] are going to be unprecedented and way out of expectations.

“If you don’t actually know how to embrace new technology in manufacturing, it is just like a blind man driving,” he added.

Ma has long spoken about “new manufacturing” — which combines components such as Big Data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing — after the concept of “new retail”, involving similar components and integrating online and offline retail, was normalised by tech companies such as Alibaba Group.

Its cloud computing arm, Alibaba Cloud, has already helped several companies in multiple industries such as rubber and automotive improve yield and cut turnover hours by helping reduce time to determine material defect and providing end-to-end integration from manufacturing to marketing, among others.

But while the “new retail” revolution put small and medium enterprises (SMEs) — essentially the backbone of many nations’ economy — at the forefront, “new manufacturing” is still an unknown for many SMEs still struggling to adopt automation as part of the Industry 4.0 transformation.

Alibaba Cloud president Simon Hu, however, expressed confidence that SMEs will still be able to benefit from the paradigm shift towards new manufacturing.

Speaking at a separate occasion at the conference, he pointed particularly to clients of Alibaba Cloud, of which the bulk or 80% are made up of SMEs, while the rest are big corporations.

“Technology can be inclusive. It is more about combining existing manufacturing capabilities with new technologies rather than simply replacing them,” said Hu.

“It is not so much about supporting corporations. My team and I share the biggest joy when it comes to how many young entrepreneurs and SMEs that we have served,” he added.