CEO of ThyssenKrupp, Germany's industrial and technology giant, hailed China's rapid development in manufacturing and artificial intelligence sectors and expressed hope of deepening cooperation with the country.
Miguel Angel Lopez Borrego shared his insights in an interview with China Central Television on the occasion of the China Development Forum 2025 held in Beijing from March 23 to 24.
Borrego highlighted China's significant achievements in manufacturing and innovation in the past decades.
"So 30 years ago we came to the country. We had a great market in front of us, we had qualified workforce and we had the opportunity to serve local customers and also multinational customers. Meanwhile, this has been turned into not only manufacturing but also innovation, being R and D centers not only for China, but for the world, not only manufacturing for China, but for the world," he said.
ThyssenKrupp has invested over 100 million yuan (about 13.78 million U.S. dollars) annually in China's automobile sector over the past three years.
Borrego expressed optimism about strengthening collaboration with China in the electric vehicle (EV) industry.
"I think China is right now the most advanced country in terms of electric vehicle. We are now also taking advantage of the very, very large market that is created in the last years with local EV manufacturers. We are providing to them the bumpers, shock absorbers and also steering elements and we are prepared for the collaboration to go with them also to other places in the world. We believe that they will play a more and more important role in also the world market. For sure with some different supply chain models compared to today, because today we see a lot of export of EVs from China to other countries. In future, I believe we will see more also local manufacturing side of Chinese players in other countries, in order to make sure that customers are served better, and of course then we will be going with them," he said.
Borrego also hailed China's surging AI innovation capabilities, noting that DeepSeek delivers impressive results while using minimal energy.
"Obviously, I cannot be comparing on a professional level between DeepSeek and ChatGPT. I think the most interesting difference is the lower usage of energy. Because of the different method how to search the data and this is of course something that is very relevant because many, many increasing applications would take us for completely different levels of energy consumption. And that's the reason why it's so important to think already how to reduce. So the top people, top mathematician, top IT people have been very much surprised by one tenth of usage power of DeepSeek,so Tremendously advanced," he said.
German industrial giant CEO hails China's manufacturing, AI development, seeks further cooperation
