Modular Buildings As Giant Parcels

Modular Buildings as "Giant Parcels", With Repeat Overseas Orders on the Rise

A British business client introduced that he purchased 63 modules of Chinese-made modular senior apartments. After being shipped from Chinese factories and arriving at UK ports, on-site hoisting and installation were finished within only two weeks. Another client from Papua New Guinea stated that 84 China-produced building modules were just like giant parcels. After more than a month of ocean shipping, they were assembled on site to form a fully functional hotel.

Continuous repeat purchases from overseas clients serve as the most direct recognition of this new model of "Chinese construction". Beyond hotels, senior apartments, dormitories and office buildings, the massive construction of global data centers has also boosted the international popularity of domestically made modular buildings.

A person in charge at CIMC Digital Energy Equipment Co., Ltd. in Jiangmen said that demand for modular data center businesses has surged worldwide over the past two years. The company has delivered prefabricated modular data center projects with a total installed capacity of over 1,000 megawatts, covering countries and regions including Malaysia, Indonesia, the Middle East and Italy.

Packing Houses for Global Sales to Tap Into a Trillion-Dollar Market

At China State Construction Hailong Intelligent Construction Industrial Park in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, there are no scaffolding or construction dust. Instead, a four-story three-dimensional factory operates at full capacity, with an annual delivery capacity of around 20,000 to 30,000 modular building units.

These are not ordinary prefab cabins, but formal modular buildings. To put it simply, ceilings, floors, water and electricity pipelines, and even the waterproof layers of restrooms are all finished on assembly lines inside factories, before being shipped overseas and pieced together like building blocks on site.

This model differs entirely from the sequential workflow of traditional construction - erecting frames first, then laying bricks, plastering walls and carrying out interior decoration. Factories adopt parallel operation. With the application of automated three-dimensional warehouses and intelligent production lines, the construction cycle of modular buildings can be cut by more than 60% compared with conventional construction. Manufacturing houses like industrial products also requires a shift in original design thinking: the exact position of every steel bar and screw must be pinpointed, with errors and precision controlled on a millimeter scale.

The high efficiency and high precision of modular construction have unlocked vast market potential. Market research institutions predict that the global modular construction market size will exceed 142.8 billion US dollars by 2030. Leveraging its complete industrial chain advantages spanning design and R&D, intelligent manufacturing, ocean logistics and oversea installation, China is standardizing house construction into a formal export business of industrial products and marching toward global markets.