The head of Finnish engineering firm KONE, who specialize in making elevators and escalators, says the company aims to accelerate its digitalization drive to increase sustainability and improve safety in the coming years, while aligning its own strategies with China's ongoing urban modernization.
Philippe Delorme, president and CEO of the KONE Corporation, was in Beijing to attend the China Development Forum 2026 which concluded on Monday after bringing together a number of senior global business leaders and scholars to explore shared opportunities emerging from China's pursuit of high-quality growth.
The two-day forum also detailed the vision and direction of China's 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), a key blueprint outlining the country's socioeconomic development goals through to the end of the decade.
In an exclusive interview with the China Global Television Network (CGTN) on the sidelines of the event, Delorme said KONE will look to advance its own tech-driven and low-emissions transition, while also tapping into more potential cooperation opportunities as China continues its upgrading and infrastructure modernization in the coming five-year planning cycle.
While striving for engineering excellence, Delorme highlighted how digital tools are already embedded in production to improve quality and help ensure overall elevator safety.
The CEO also outlined three pillars underpinning KONE's innovation push: expanding digital capabilities across its services, facilitating faster urban upgrading and modernization, and advancing environmentally efficient solutions.
"We are moving now into a field of innovation, [where] we'll be guided by three things. Number one: we want to drive digital everywhere within our service business. Number two: we want to support the move of urban renewal and drive modernization at lightning speed. The industry is used to modernize elevators in four weeks -- in one month -- we want to do it in one week. So divide by four, the time it takes to modernize an elevator. And the third point is green. China, the [15th] Five-Year Plan, is very important on green. We want all our elevators to be super energy efficient with this hybrid system that we call 'regenerative drive', which we are bringing in all our elevators as [of] 2025," he said.
Delorme stressed the company's progress in the application of digital technology, saying that advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are being utilized to connect its elevator network and identify potential safety risks before they occur.
"KONE used to be an elevator manufacturer and equipment manufacturer. Now we become a digitally-enabled company, and the principle is very simple. Safety and reliability is very important when you go in an elevator. You want it to be safe and you want to be working. So we use digital technology to predict any failure and sort them out before that would happen. For this, we connect all our elevators and apply AI so that we would detect failures before they would happen. And in the best case, we're able to filter 80 percent of the issues before they would happen in a real-life case," he said.
Finnish elevator maker KONE targets digital shift to improve safety, sustainability: CEO
