Carlsberg was one of the first international breweries to start exporting beer to China about 150 years ago. For several decades now the company has been represented by a number of sites on the Chinese market. The enterprise aims to improve the quality of local beers in the long term and grow together with its partners, suppliers and employees. This is to be brought about by constant modernization of existing plant equipment and the introduction of new, advanced technologies.
KHS has an important role to play in this strategy – recently, for instance, the systems provider installed two canning lines at Carlsberg Dali Brewery and at Carlsberg Yibin Brewery. Despite the restrictions imposed by the corona pandemic, the new canning lines were actually commissioned before the agreed date. KHS’ policy of regionalization was central to the project’s speedy realization. “In setting up our own sales organizations and increasing our local service proficiency, we provide the regional expertise needed to independently maintain, install and commission our machinery with the help of local teams,” explains Norman Gras, global key account manager at KHS.
In this large-scale project, Carlsberg found it important that its new canning lines have a clear and streamlined layout. This was also to be as identical as possible at the two Chinese sites. 
The heavily reduced number of buffer and conveying segments in the new line design make higher demands of the system control and machine availability – the shorter distances between the individual stations on the line tolerate no faults in the production processes. The high degree of reliability and ease of operation and maintenance of KHS’ technology proved convincing, however. “The reject rate is under 1% and the level of efficiency is over 95% – and is even 100% in Yibin. These are fantastic figures,” states Paul Kime, asset and projects director at Carlsberg Asia.
