Media Spotlight: Securities Times Reports on Zoomlion, How a 4,000-Ton Crane Sol
October 23,2026
Recently, Securities Times published a report, China's Construction Machinery Enters the Industry's No-Man's-Land, How a 4,000-Ton Crane Solves a World-Class Lifting Challenge, using the world's largest all-terrain crane as a typical case to show how Zoomlion's hard-core innovation enters the global industry no-man's-land and supports advanced manufacturing. The full report follows.
Securities Times report. By Zhang Yifan, Securities Times. At a height of 206 meters barely visible to the naked eye, the crane boom steadily lifts a hundred-ton nacelle and rotor, precisely aligning each of the 176 bolts on the tower-top flange. The bolts are 42 mm in diameter with 45 mm holes, and alignment error must be kept within 1.5 mm.
A 4,000-ton all-terrain crane performing a lifting task. This is Zoomlion's self-developed 4,000-ton all-terrain crane at the Ansai 100 MW wind-power project in Yan'an. The crane's threading a needle high in the air and strong wind involves not only the millimeter-level alignment of hundreds of tons of steel, but also the rise in gold content and new content of China's high-end equipment manufacturing. At a new global competitive juncture, the construction machinery industry's shift from single-product breakthroughs to complete industrial-system building has become the latest sample of China's advanced manufacturing growing stronger.
Setting a world record
The crane's aerial needle-threading must face high winds. Effective construction windows at mountain wind farms are limited; a force-6 gale that triggers a blue alert in cities is the norm to overcome at wind-lift sites, bringing swing inertia of heavy nacelles and rotors and structural vibration-fatigue risks from periodic shaking of flexible booms.
Building a rigid-flexible intelligent control system
Through extensive use of intelligent technology, Zoomlion's R&D team built a targeted rigid-flexible intelligent control system. Supporting this steel giant's embroidery is a power-unit system balancing heavy-output and fine-motion control, releasing immense force yet handling an egg without breaking it. Introducing high-precision lidar and other sensors enables the boom to predict swing trends in milliseconds and automatically apply reverse force to adjust speed and direction, keeping the load directly below the boom.
Quietly entering the world's no-man's-land
This 4,000-ton all-terrain crane has quietly entered the world's no-man's-land. Overseas mass-produced maximum all-terrain cranes still sit at the 1,200-ton class. Zheng Baomi, technical director of Zoomlion's Engineering Crane Global R&D Center, noted the product integrates multiple innovative technologies, holds over 50 patents, and is among Zoomlion's highest gold- and new-content equipment, priced at 30 to 40 million yuan yet still in short supply. The secret to its popularity: installing today's mainstream 10 MW-plus onshore wind turbines, this equipment is three times as efficient as other solutions. Lifting heavy loads high and steady was not the hardest part of the R&D journey, that technology was already applied on the 2,400-ton model. The core innovation difficulty lies in all-terrain passability. How to let it cross mountains and traverse the country was a thread through the entire R&D process, Zheng said. All-terrain means unobstructed passage on all road surfaces. For this crane, the toughest surface is not slopes or hills but the expressway. China strictly limits vehicle outer dimensions on expressways: 3 m wide, 22.25 m long, 4 m high. The previous 2,400-ton model had already pushed internal space to the limit; now lifting capacity must rise 60%, supporting equipment weight up 40%, some structural parts 40% larger, yet the overall envelope barely grows, meaning the team must calculate precisely within limited space, integrating stronger load capacity in a compact footprint.
Disruptive reconstruction from the chassis
Facing this severe constraint, Zoomlion's R&D team started from the chassis, implementing a disruptive reconstruction: the traditional convex frame became a concave configuration, axles adopted segmented structures with independent suspension, completing a new layout in compact space. Meanwhile, all tires can synchronously deflect 35 degrees, giving the vehicle crab-walk oblique movement to flexibly avoid obstacles on narrow mountain roads and precisely adjust its work position.
Driving coordinated industrial-chain leap
In 2020, China pledged to the world to reach over 1.2 billion kW of total wind and solar capacity by 2030. Since then, renewable construction has advanced rapidly, national wind installed capacity reached 640 million kW, up 127.3% from 2020 and averaging 17.9% annual growth, demonstrating China's responsibility for global green development. The rapid wind-industry expansion directly drives fast iteration of turbine equipment technology, with units evolving toward larger megawatts and higher hub heights. As single-unit capacity rises from 5 MW to 10 MW, nacelle weight jumps from hundreds of tons to 200 tons and hub height from 160 m to 200 m. The comprehensive upgrade in turbine size, weight and lift height poses new challenges to lifting equipment's load capacity and stability, forcing the birth of this world's largest crane. In Zheng's view, the market demand brought by the booming energy industry is a major opportunity for upstream equipment manufacturing transformation. Before launching the 4,000-ton all-terrain crane R&D, Zoomlion formed a 10-plus-member special research team that spent a month visiting multiple domestic wind farms and upstream-downstream equipment makers, collecting real on-site pain points and turning various lifting difficulties into clear, actionable product-design metrics, ultimately giving rise to this world-first major equipment. The crane's boom uses 1100 MPa ultra-high-strength steel, nearly four times the strength of ordinary construction steel, cutting overall weight while ensuring structural safety and load capacity, a breakthrough achieved by the R&D team joining top domestic steel enterprises to conquer core process bottlenecks in smelting, forming and welding; the high-strength steel plate welding alone won a national-level R&D award. This major national equipment brings together over 240 supporting suppliers from 16 provinces and 54 cities, driving an entire industrial chain upward. Looking back at China's wind-equipment innovation, ultra-large-capacity units, carbon-fiber super-long blades, floating packages, offshore flexible HVDC conversion, grid-forming converters, intelligent sensing and O&M robots, behind every advanced manufacturing achievement is a similar R&D story. It is this steady, cumulative effort that has forged the autonomous, controllable capability of China's major-equipment key components.
Construction machinery's next challenge
Driven by domestic super-project demand, Chinese construction machinery keeps advancing into technological no-man's-land. Ten-thousand-ton-meter tower cranes, super-large-diameter tunnel boring machines, large mining electric equipment and high-end aerial work platforms have been delivered one after another; multiple chokepoint technologies have been broken through, with domestic equipment continuously supporting domestic super-projects and also expanding overseas. In the first half of 2026, China's construction machinery exports reached 34.373 billion US dollars, up 21.7% year-on-year, with a trade surplus of 33.118 billion US dollars, sustaining years of high growth. Crawler excavators, components, electric forklifts and lifting platforms, off-road dump trucks and loaders, export growth spans all categories; export growth to major markets including the US, Indonesia, Brazil, India, Vietnam and Australia continues to accelerate. Meanwhile, domestic construction-machinery firms deeply recognize that international competition has upgraded from single-product contests to comprehensive capability contests across manufacturing, supply chain, finance and service; to transform from product export to large-scale, high-end, high-value-added, complete equipment, the going-overseas logic should shift from product output to system-capability output. On the product side, software-hardware integration is maturing, XCMG upgraded a forklift into an AGV logistics system, turning cargo handling into a data stream that informs production decisions. On the manufacturing side, a global network is taking shape, Zoomlion's concrete pump trucks have formed a domestic superstructure scheduling, local chassis procurement, local assembly, terminal sales model for faster customer response and delivery.
Building world-leading products is a breakthrough in single-point technology; building a world-leading industry is a brand-new proposition the Chinese construction machinery industry must answer. Last month's National Advanced Manufacturing Conference called for continuously growing advanced manufacturing to provide strong support for Chinese-style modernization. Zoomlion chairman Zhan Chunxin believes that through technological innovation, industrial-structure optimization and overseas-market expansion, the company has achieved phased results and will next continuously raise the industry's gold content, new content and green content to support advanced manufacturing development.
Source : www.51cm.org
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