The influence of intelligent manufacturing on financial performance and innovation performance: the case of China

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in advanced manufacturing systems to realise intelligent manufacturing. However, there is still a lack of empirical research on the impact of intelligent manufacturing on enterprise performances, especially for China. The author adopts the enterprise panel data of intelligent manufacturing implemented by China’s manufacturing industry in 2014 to 2019, and uses propensity score matching with difference in differences (PSM-DID) method to investigate the impact of intelligent manufacturing on financial performance and innovation performance. The research yields two main conclusions. First, the implementation of intelligent manufacturing has a significant role in promoting the financial performance and innovation performance of manufacturing enterprises. Second, technology-intensive industries improve the quantity of innovation by implementing intelligent manufacturing, thus promoting the improvement of short-term financial performance, but the improvement of innovation quality has a negative impact on short-term financial performance. In labour-intensive industries, the relationship between financial performance and innovation performance is not obvious.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligent
• industry 4.0
• intelligent manufacturing
• financial performance
• innovation performance

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Soft Science Project of Zhejiang Province (2020C35025), Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project of Zhejiang Province (18NDJC128YB), Wenzhou Basic Scientific Research Project (R20190019), Wenzhou Social Sciences Planning Project (19wsk215 and 19wsk216), Zhejiang Province ‘13th Five-year Plan’ Characteristic Specialty Construction Project (20170408), Educational Science Planning Project of Zhejiang Province (2020SCG160).