Representatives of overseas companies attending the launch event of China Media Group's (CMG) 2024 Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Action Report for foreign enterprises said ESG practices are crucial to their business operations in China.
Foreign-funded enterprises are important participants in Chinese modernization, and their commitment to ESG practices are a key part of their contribution to the Chinese economy, according to Xia Xueying, vice president of Schneider Electric (China).
"ESG is a concept that our company has been practicing for a long time, and we have always believed that this is a responsibility that multinational companies should practice. This sense of responsibility does not come from the external environment, but from within our company. Foreign-funded enterprises have contributed a lot of wisdom to China, and we hope that sustainability and ESG will be part of our contribution to China's economy and overall social modernization," she said.
"Mitsubishi Electric has made the sustainable development of society a global management policy, and a department dedicated to this campaign has been established in China this April. Our focus so far has been on the environment, and we have been actively promoting a wide range of activities in social and governance fields as well,” said Yutaka Oyaizu, head of Mitsubishi Electric's China office.
First coined in 2005, the concept of corporate ESG provides a view of a company and its long-term value potential and relevance to its stakeholders, beyond purely financial considerations.
An ESG rating measures a company’s environmental and social impact and the effectiveness of corporate governance in managing them. Organizations create ESG strategies to help them act on and measure what is mutually good for profits, people, and the planet.
Foreign firms in China embrace ESG
Honor's humanoid robot, Lightning, which swept the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on Sunday, is a natural extension of years of accumulation in consumer electronics technology, said its developers.
A leading smart device provider in China, Honor independently developed the model, which dominated the podium at the event as it was used by all three teams whose autonomous navigating robots ran the fastest times.
At the Honor factory in Pingshan District in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province, where robotics engineers developed Lightning. They said the robot's body design incorporates a simulation system that, through artificial intelligence algorithms, can iterate nearly 30,000 design schemes of varying sizes over three months. Complete and mature systems are also in place for battery, communication, and reliability verification.
"We built a simulation lab from scratch. For the robots, we digitize the entire design and put it into a computer. We have our own material library, which can meet the force, thermal, and chemical property demands for each component, under different environments and speeds. We've accumulated about 1000 kinds of materials. For example, if there's a risk with the robot's neck, we just need to change the material code from 001 to 002. Now, through our simulations, we only need one day to perform parallel calculations on 10 different designs, before creating a mold and verifying it in the lab," said Li Zheng, a senior engineer at Honor.
An autonomous robot capable of completing a half-marathon involves a complete industry chain, with core components including high-precision sensors, LiDAR, motors, operating systems, and control algorithms. The development of robotic marathoners have driven an increasing number of component enterprises to get involved.
Manifold, a tech firm established by newly-graduated PhDs, has developed a 3D spatial memory module, which can model an environment in real time and transform it into images that robots can understand. They said several robots running the half-marathon this year adopted their solution.
"Our device can operate within a one-kilometer tunnel with an error margin of only tens of centimeters. For robots, especially in the absence of GPS, this allows them to accurately determine their location. The underlying technology is a multi-sensor fusion technology that we developed in-house," said Qin Youming, CEO and founder of Manifold.
The Beijing Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center set up a training camp for the marathon event. Many university students came a month ahead of the event to develop and debug their technologies and algorithms based on open-source robot bodies, databases, and training platforms.
"These high-quality databases and highly open-source control algorithms are actually very helpful to us. We no longer need to build the house from the ground up, but can skip the most basic part," said Sun Jingyu, a student from Shandong University.
"Through this racing event, I believe we can make our robots more reliable and stable, while also supporting high-dynamic, high-load movements. This is crucial for robots' future application in both industrial, commercial and domestic scenarios," said Guo Yijie, head of the innovative humanoid department and the Marathon project of Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
Engineers share development story behind Beijing humanoid half-marathon champion model
