Built on a Thailand refrigeration plant pilot, the 12 module system coordinates 13 software agents across 25 manufacturing scenarios. Midea claims a 50% defect cut and a 43% reduction in order lead time, with no independent auditor named in its release.
Midea spent two years testing an AI-coordinated manufacturing system at its Thailand refrigeration plant. On June 9, 2026, the Chinese home-appliance company announced it would package that system into a 12-module product for sale to other Chinese firms building factories overseas, according to a Midea press release distributed by PR Newswire.
Midea calls the offering an "agentic factory." In plain terms, that means a manufacturing system where software agents, not just robots, coordinate work across training, quality control, and supply chain steps. Midea says its Thailand plant runs 13 of these agents across 25 manufacturing scenarios, and the company is now deconstructing that pilot into modules any Chinese manufacturer can replicate.
The pitch lands against a market Midea frames as hungry. The release cites a Deloitte figure that 55% of Chinese enterprises hope to grow through overseas expansion. The source does not name the specific Deloitte report, date, or sample size, so the figure is best read as Midea's characterization of consultant data rather than a standalone benchmark.
Midea claims the Thailand pilot produced specific results. According to the company's release, the plant saw a 43% reduction in end-to-end order lead time, a 32% drop in customer complaint rate, a 62% shorter employee training and certification cycle, a 50% cut in finished product defect rate, and on-time raw material arrivals above 96%, with exception response compressed from 48 hours to under 12. Each of these is a Midea self-reported number. No independent auditor is named in the source.
The 12 modules group into three buckets. On the workforce side, an AIGC and VR-based multilingual training system cut new-hire training from 8 days to 3, Midea says, and the company frames that as a way to handle a multinational labor force. On the quality side, a "VOC-to-VOP" seven-step loop, backed by an internal knowledge base of more than 12 million quality cases, traces customer complaints to specific production lines and root causes within seconds. On the supply chain side, a cross-border AI agent monitors 35 core nodes in real time, paired with a logistics arm called Annto that handles kitting at a rate Midea puts above 99%.
One certification does sit outside Midea. In August 2025, the company's Jingzhou washing machine factory received what Midea describes as the world's first "Agentic Factory" certification from the World Record Certification Agency (WRCA). WRCA is a record-attestation body, not a manufacturing auditor, so the designation certifies a label rather than a level of performance.
Two customer cases anchor the go-global thesis. Wuhan Honghai Technology, a Midea supplier, completed a 2024 capacity expansion in Thailand from infrastructure to production launch in five months, with Thailand business volume increasing 1.6x in 2025, per Midea. Xiamen Hexing Packaging, an 18-year Midea partner, moved from domestic supplier to global partner with factories in Southeast Asia and North America and was added to Midea's global strategic partner whitelist in 2025. Both accounts come from Midea, not from the customers themselves.
The actual question is who buys a 12-module agentic factory. Midea is pitching peer Chinese manufacturers expanding abroad, including the small appliance, electronics, and packaging suppliers already in its orbit, and the new Midea Go-Global Partner Program, announced alongside the launch, signals a channel rather than a one-off sale. Simon Zhang, Midea Group's vice president and chief digital officer, framed the offering in the release as "not merely standardized equipment" but a way of "turning Midea's experience into practical guidance and implementation support."
Two questions remain before the metrics can be read as industry benchmarks. First, no independent party has audited the Thailand plant's defect, lead time, or training figures, and the release does not name one. Second, compressing new-hire training from eight days to three reshapes the front end of the production labor force. Midea frames that as a productivity win. The same change could also flatten a worker's first weeks on a line in ways the company has not publicly measured. Both questions will track whoever signs up for the first module.