New list of the world’s cuttting-edge plants has none in the West
20 January 2026 
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has added 23 new industrial plants to its Global Lighthouse Network of cutting-edge manufacturing sites around the world – and 17 of the 23 are in China. None of the latest additions to the network are in Western Europe or North America, but India has three, and Vietnam, Turkey and Azerbaijan have one each.
The Lighthouse network, launched in in 2018, now consists of more than 220 factories in more than 30 countries that are intended to act as benchmarks for global manufacturing. The scheme, co-founded with McKinsey, has an advisory board that includes representatives from Siemens and Schneider Electric.
Based on eight years of data from the Lighthouse plants, WEF has launched an AI-powered “industrial intelligence platform” called Lumina to help industrialists to progress from pilot plants with lower risk. It is designed to help them to benchmark performance, prioritise investments, scale proven use cases, and avoid common pitfalls as they accelerate their industrial transformation.
WEF says the launch of Lumina reflects a broader shift among manufacturers toward multi-technology deployment and data-driven decision-making. The data shows that 94% of successful industrial transformations combine multiple technologies, with AI being deployed most often, alongside IoT, cloud and digital twins. Lighthouses that pair these technologies with workforce and sustainability initiatives outperform their peers by an average of 16% or more, the Forum adds, “demonstrating that competitiveness increasingly depends on integrating technology, talent and emissions reduction”.
“Lumina provides the strategic blueprint of Lighthouse sites, offering a scalable model for future-ready transformation,” says Jimmy Gu, vice-president for supply chain performance and digitalisation at Schneider Electric. The platform will evolve as new Lighthouse data and industrial transformations are added.
A new report from WEF analyses the industrial transformations achieved by the Lighthouse sites to date, offering a blueprint for other manufacturers to scale their technologies to improve their operational performance.
Although all of the new Lighthouse additions are in Asia, several are owned/operated by Western companies including Unilever (which has two plants in India and one in China), Schneider Electric, Ford (in Turkey), Michelin and Carl Zeiss.
One of the new Chinese Lighthouse plants is Siemens’ “digital native” factory in Nanjing – the company’s largest research and production centre for drives, electric motors and CNC systems outside of Germany. The 73,000m2 site has been chosen for its continuous digital transformation and AI-driven adaptive manufacturing, which has cut time-to-market by 33%.
The site was designed, tested and optimised entirely virtually before a single brick was laid. “This approach not only enabled us to construct the factory faster and with outstanding cost-efficiency but also to build it under the toughest pandemic conditions,” says Cedrik Neike, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries. “By combining our global manufacturing expertise with local insight and a digital-first mindset, we continuously optimise every part of the operation, making it one of the most efficient and flexible factories in the world.”
The Nanjing factory needed to overhaul its production processes to react to mounting pressures, including increasingly varied customer orders that required production lines to be reconfigured every four weeks. Another challenge was that delivery windows had shrunk from 45 days to 10, while market demand was fluctuating.
To address these challenges in the high-variety, low-volume manufacturing operation, Siemens deployed digital twins, modular automation, manufacturing management systems, and more than 50 AI applications. Compared to 2022, the initiative has cut lead times by 78% and time-to-market by 33%. Productivity rose by 14% by 2024, while field failures dropped by 46%, and the factory cut its direct and energy-related carbon emissions by 28%.
The Nanjing plant is the fifth Siemens manufacturing site to be named a Lighthouse Factory by the WEF, following sites in Amberg, Erlangen and Fürth in Germany, and Chengdu in China.
