How Clean Energy and AI Are Shaping Brand Strategy in China: A Conversation with Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang (HollySys, China)

Founded in 1993, HollySys is an automation and control solution provider in China that operates in three major sectors: industrial automation, railway transportation automation, and medical automation. It specializes in control products—such as distributed control systems, safety instrumentation systems, and asset management systems—and has business centers in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. The company has more than 35,000 customers, over 5,500 employees, and spends about 10 percent of its revenue on research and development (R&D).

In recent years, HollySys has been expanding its technology and business capabilities in new energy, energy conservation, and related fields to support its customers in achieving their energy transition goals. The company is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across its operations.

China’s government has made clean energy a priority for its economy. Under the dual carbon strategy, the country aims to achieve peak carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. In 2023, it reported that, driven by these goals, it has been advancing the use of renewable energy and energy storage: China’s energy storage market was predicted to reach 70 gigawatts by 2025 (compared with 15 gigawatts in 2020).

Last year, China took a number of steps to promote sustainability, in particular, sustainability information disclosure. In February, the country’s three stock exchanges issued environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting guidelines, mandating companies to disclose ESG data in 2026. In December, the Ministry of Finance published the Basic Guidelines for Corporate Sustainability Disclosure.

These initiatives come as R&D surges in China. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), R&D expenditure in China grew by 8.7 percent in 2023, compared to 2.4 percent growth in the OECD area. China’s R&D expenditure reached 96 percent of U.S. gross domestic expenditure on R&D in purchasing power parity–adjusted U.S. dollars—up from 72 percent 10 years before.

Jennifer Zhang is General Manager of the Branding Department at HollySys. She leads a team of eight people. Ms. Zhang originally joined the company in 2008, before leaving in 2015 to study for an MBA. She returned in 2020, working in investor relations before moving to her current role.

The Branding Department is responsible for developing and optimizing branding strategies to drive brand awareness and support business growth across the group and its subsidiaries.

Among other things, Ms. Zhang leads employee brand training to enhance employees’ brand awareness. Her team is also in charge of brand asset protection, which includes filing, management, and protection of trademarks. In this interview, Ms. Zhang discusses her role and the implications of trends in AI and clean energy for branding.

How important is branding for HollySys?
For customers, it’s not very easy to understand what we do in our facilities: very seldom do people have the chance to visit a chemical plant or a power plant because these plants are highly sensitive facilities with strict safety and security protocols, and in most cases, public access is prohibited by law. We also provide critical signaling systems for high-speed rail, and, similarly, we’re unable to share videos or images that demonstrate our technology due to confidentiality and security concerns. So, that’s why we must be very creative in our branding—very creative in our branding!

When we want to expand from one industry to another industry, we also need to improve our awareness, because industrial automation is a very open market. We’re not only competing with local players, but also international players. They have a longer history than we do, are more experienced than we are, and they often provide a much more complete solution, including more hardware and more software. We respect our competitors. Branding is a way to let our customers and users know that we can provide quality-assured products.

A significant part of HollySys’s business today involves clean energy. How does this impact your work, and how do you expect it to have an impact in the future?
Our business is getting more and more involved in clean energy. This includes nuclear, solar, and wind power as part of China’s dual carbon strategy [under which the country has committed to reaching peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060].

Our customers would like to have more clean energy solutions. For example, we have launched a new product, the optical bus control system, which can replace the traditional distributed control system. This uses an optical fiber network instead of traditional copper cables to transmit signals. We can greatly save costs by reducing the copper cables by at least 30 percent and reducing cabinet space by 90 percent. It shortens the product development cycle and significantly lowers labor demands.

Recently, we completed a project in Xinjiang province for Sinopec, the largest chemical company in China, to use solar power to generate green hydrogen. In this way, green hydrogen can replace the traditional method to generate hydrogen by natural gas. It’s estimated that this will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 485,000 tons annually.

In our company brochure, more pages will be dedicated to carbon emission and clean energies. Our customers would like to know more and more about our work in the clean energy sector. By sharing our success stories we can attract a broader audience—including media, government stakeholders, and potential investors.

Our end customers, including the big power plants and chemical plants, want to have clean energy solutions. That’s a goal for the whole of society, the whole nation.

By exhibiting at and participating in more clean energy events, we can greatly improve our brand awareness and improve the understanding of HollySys’s social responsibilities by using advanced automation and control solutions to reduce energy consumption and improve the efficiency and quality of the product. So that’s a very big focus of our branding.

What are the main intellectual property (IP) issues that arise in the clean energy sector? And how do you approach them?
In China, we have a long way to go in terms of building people’s awareness of IP. Also, in supply chain management, there may be risks of trade secret leaks. And, in building up a joint project, sometimes IP ownership is unclear and there are disputes.

In terms of international business, there are complex global IP rules. Each jurisdiction has different IP laws for patents, trademarks, and enforcement, so that also has an influence on the global business. At the same time, I think patents in the new energy industry are developing faster than in other industries.

Considering all these factors, we need to strengthen our IP protection. From the very early stages of R&D, we need to have our IP experts join to help with IP protection. Internally, we need to invest in training and in deepening our knowledge of the IP rules in China and globally. And in doing joint venture projects, we need to set clear IP rules to better manage and protect the IP.

Also, we need to learn more about which patents are publicly disclosed internationally, and not confidential and which patents are protected. In this way, we can protect our patents, and after that, we can also use these patents to benefit our customers in China and in other jurisdictions. That’s a long, long way to go and a lot of work to do. We’re still in a very early stage of R&D, so we need to better protect these patents and to learn to generate the technology as well as have better IP protection, better learning, and better cooperation with our partners.

HollySys is still a very small company and we don’t have a big influence in the international arena. We have a long way to go, and we still have a lot of work to do in terms of patent and trademark protection. We have introduced some tools, including some tools from the INTA website such as the Know Before You Go reports to learn about each jurisdiction’s regulations for IP protection. I think that will be very helpful for HollySys, and we’re grateful for that.

How can IP systems support and promote the development of clean energy? Are there any changes you would like to see in laws, regulations, or other mechanisms regarding clean energy and IP?
We need to encourage enterprises and scientific research institutes to continuously invest in R&D. The IP system can incentivize investment in R&D by protecting innovations. Whether it’s in energy storage smart grids or renewable energy control systems, with strong IP protection, companies are more willing to take risks and bring new technologies to the market.

The IP system not only protects innovation but also promotes technology diffusion by disclosing the patent information, such as patent specifications. IP can also promote knowledge-sharing through licensing and partnerships. For example, companies can license clean energy technologies to partners in different regions, helping scale solutions globally while still protecting their rights and guaranteeing free market competition.

First, we need to establish targeted IP incentive policies and provide longer protection periods or tax incentives for core technology patents in the clean energy field, such as energy storage batteries and green hydrogen production, and in this way encourage enterprises to increase R&D investment.

Second, we need to strengthen international IP cooperation and the rules to promote the sharing of patent data among jurisdictions in the fields of clean energy technology. This could include establishing a unified patent examination cooperation mechanism to shorten the international patent application cycle and reduce the cost for businesses, or improving the balance mechanism between IP transformation and the public interest for clean energy technologies related to public health or environmental safety (such as low-cost photovoltaic modules for emergency energy storage systems) under specific circumstances, such as a sudden energy crisis, by introducing the compulsory license system and allowing the government or enterprises to use the patented technologies on the premise of paying reasonable fees—ensuring timely solutions that benefit the public.

China is placing an increasing focus on ESG issues and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standards. What impact does this have on your work?
Overall, ESG is more and more important, not only in terms of environmental protection, but also corporate management and protection of employees. In the long run, we think ESG can help the company better manage and grow and, ultimately, improve the company’s competitiveness.

On our website, both our Chinese website and our global website, ESG is a very important section. It’s where we disclose our management and our internal ESG policies for employees and our compliance with ISO standards, like the green manufacturing and carbon emissions standards. People are very interested in learning about the companies’ efforts to deliver ESG.

That’s a social responsibility we have to shoulder, and that’s very sustainable, and very well recognized by our customers.

Are you seeing more regulation around ESG and what form does this take? How do you ensure you comply with all the regulations?
We’re seeing more ESG regulations, both in China and globally, including stricter rules on carbon emissions and mandatory ESG disclosures aimed at protecting workers and improving workplace conditions—such as working hour standards, labor regulations, and gender-based protection, as well as increased training. There is also more focus on some supply chains and transparency: in supply chain management, there are also increased ESG regulations.

We have three major manufacturing projects in the three major cities in China. All these production plants need to meet stringent ESG regulations. Given we have more stringent ESG requirements, some companies have built up an ESG department or a small team overseen by the Board to monitor the whole company’s ESG performance.

At HollySys, there isn’t a single dedicated ESG department; instead, there are several teams with roles in ESG: the manufacturing system, internal auditing, and the HR department, for example. My team is also focusing on ESG. We produce press releases, big campaigns, and also internal activities and national awards. In this way, we can demonstrate to our customers our social responsibilities and our practice by the laws. We do that across the team, rather than with one individual, because the team is quite small and each person has a big workload.

Finally, HollySys is leading in the development and use of artificial intelligence. What role does AI play in your branding strategy?
This is a very interesting topic. This year is a big year for AI, after the release of ChatGPT and DeepSeek. More and more people want to use AI. For IP protection, when we search patents or trademarks, AI is very efficient and convenient. AI can also speed up R&D. It’s changed everybody’s job in every industry. We have also released an AI solution for our end customers, which is very popular.

AI is bringing a very big change for branding, for example, in terms of drafting press releases—and you can write emails using AI with pictures and videos. We can generate videos of presentations using AI much more quickly. In the past, each year we could generate only about 30 videos. But with AI, I can generate as many as 200 videos in a year. Every day, or every two days, you can see a new video or an interview, or a talk generated by HollySys on TikTok. In this way, efficiency will be greatly improved, and people can more easily understand what we do every day and what our solutions can provide to customers. AI can bring us together.

I also worry about AI because it’s like a small kid—it grows so fast. The calculation capacity could double or triple every two to three months. No one can guess what the future will be, but I’m positive that AI is still a very strong, powerful tool for people to build a better life and work environment and to increase efficiencies.

For example, there are some AI-powered chatbots on the Internet and social media, and they can handle more complex customer questions than before. AI can also help us better understand our customers by tracking their views and clicks, predicting customers’ purchasing behavior, and analyzing how they choose products and which brands they like.

In this way, we can also optimize our content strategy with much more accuracy than before. AI can support us in content creation by designing much better materials and writing better messages, and by speeding up the production of brochures, videos, and social media. The changes that AI is bringing to branding are quite significant compared with other industries.

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