Technology

Smart border port keeps China-Vietnam trade flowing nonstop

Published

1 year ago

April 14, 2025

BEIJING, April 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — A report from People’s Daily: On a recent spring morning at Youyiguan Port, known as Friendship Pass, on the China–Vietnam border in Pingxiang city, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, a steady stream of trucks lined up at the border crossing, ferrying tropical fruits into China and hauling machinery and electronics to Vietnam. The scene is brisk, efficient – and increasingly automated.

Friendship Pass, one of the largest and most efficient land border crossings between China and Vietnam, is undergoing a high-tech overhaul. The site is being transformed into China’s first cross-border smart port, with the Chinese section scheduled to commence pilot operations later this year.

Roughly 1,500 vehicles now pass through the port each day. Once the upgrade is completed on both sides, clearance capacity is expected to multiply, strengthening trade links between China and ASEAN and deepening regional economic integration.

For Vietnamese truck driver Nguyen, the changes are already evident. “I just roll down my window for fingerprint and facial scans – the process typically takes about 45 seconds,” he said. Nguyen regularly transports fruits from Vietnam to distribution centers in China. The streamlined clearance process now enable him to make up to 30 round trips per month. “I hope to see even more Vietnamese fruits exported to China,” he said. “Faster clearance means more deliveries – and higher earnings.”

At a bonded warehouse near Friendship Pass, run by the Guangxi branch of Fuliankang Cross-Border Logistics, shipments of high-value electronic components arrive from Chinese factories, bound for assembly lines in Vietnam. With a few taps on his phone, warehouse manager Li Zhen pulls up real-time customs data. “The Smart Youyiguan app allows us to submit declarations in advance and track clearance in real time,” he said. “It has drastically reduced processing times.”

In 2024, the company’s exports via Friendship Pass surged to $240 million more than doubling the previous year’s total.

The gains reflect a broader digital transformation underway at the port. Since 2022, Youyiguan Customs has rolled out a range of digital systems – including a smart logistics management platform, an intelligent inspection assistance system, and a smart quarantine processing system – all aimed at reducing delays and improving throughput.

In the first two months of this year, trade at the port recorded double-digit growth, giving China’s foreign trade a strong start.

The smart logistics management platform allows for real-time tracking from the moment a cargo manifest is submitted, using BeiDou satellite positioning and video surveillance to streamline dispatching. Meanwhile, the intelligent inspection assistance system uses display screens and geomagnetic sensors to monitor traffic flow and assign inspection bays automatically – cutting wait times by 20 percent and increasing turnover efficiency by 35 percent.

The quarantine process has also been fully digitized. From vehicle queuing and fumigation scheduling to gas concentration monitoring and report submission, the smart quarantine processing system now saves an average of 3.5 hours per shipment.

“Import clearance for a fruit container previously took six hours,” said Lu Qiujing, a business manager at a Guangxi-based fruit importer. “Now it can be done in as little as three. That means less spoilage and quicker delivery to market.”

The China–Vietnam cross-border smart port project at Friendship Pass represents a major investment in regional trade infrastructure, with a total outlay of 1.062 billion yuan ($145.49 million). It integrates advanced technologies such as satellite navigation, 5G technology, AI-driven transport vehicles, and large-scale automated cargo-handling machinery, along with smart inspection systems and a centralized command platform – all engineered to sustain uninterrupted, 24/7 operations.

The Chinese segment of the project has been largely complete and is now in system integration and testing phases, with trial runs scheduled to begin within the year.

“Once completed, the port will enable 24/7 customs clearance,” said Shi Lei, deputy director of Youyiguan Customs. “Goods will be able to travel from Nanning in Guangxi to Bac Giang or Bac Ninh in Vietnam within 24 hours – making round-the-clock cross-border trade a reality.”

Vietnamese authorities, for their part, approved their smart port development plan on August 17, 2024. Construction on the Vietnamese side is now in full swing.

Wei Zhaohui, director of the Guangxi International Expo Affairs Bureau, called the project not only a major step forward in enhancing port clearance capacity and expanding trade between the two countries, but also a model for promoting trade and investment liberalization across the broader China-ASEAN region.

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SOURCE People’s Daily

Technology

X Square Robot Unveils New Embodied AI Model, Says Robots Will Arrive in Homes in 35 Days

Published

53 minutes ago

April 23, 2026

Backed by Alibaba, ByteDance, Xiaomi and Meituan, X Square Robot unveiled a next-generation embodied AI foundation model for home robots and said its first deployments in everyday households will begin within 35 days.

BEIJING, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — X Square Robot on Tuesday unveiled Wall-B, a new embodied AI foundation model designed for deployment in real-world homes, marking what the company described as a major step toward bringing general-purpose robots into daily family life.

At a launch event themed “Born to Bot, Bot to Family,” the company also introduced its World Unified Model (WUM) architecture, a training framework that combines vision, language, action and physical prediction within a single system from the outset. X Square said the model is intended to help robots operate in the far more unpredictable setting of a home, where tasks, layouts and interactions vary from moment to moment.

“Robots in factories and robots in homes are fundamentally different,” said Qian Wang, founder and CEO of X Square Robot. “In factories, they repeat the same action 10,000 times. In a home, they may need to perform 10,000 different actions, each in a different context. The real challenge is not repetition, but whether a robot can execute new, untrained actions in an unstructured environment.”

Wall-B is the company’s first full implementation of its World Unified Model architecture. Unlike modular systems that train perception, language and control separately, X Square Robot said World Unified Model optimizes those capabilities jointly from the very beginning. The company said that allows physical prediction — including force, friction and collision dynamics — to emerge as part of the model itself, rather than being layered on afterward.

“We train vision, language, action and prediction in the same network from day one,” said Wang Hao, chief technology officer of X Square. “Human infants do not learn to see, move and communicate in isolated stages. They learn by integrating perception and action at the same time, with constant feedback from the physical world. That is the principle behind our architecture.”

X Square Robot said the model was built on two core foundations. The first is a data strategy centered on real, non-staged home environments, aimed at exposing the system to the long tail of household scenarios — misplaced objects, temporary occlusion, unexpected obstacles and spontaneous human activity. The second is a physics-aware predictive mechanism that enables the robot to anticipate physical outcomes before taking action, rather than merely reacting after contact occurs.

Together, those elements are meant to narrow one of robotics’ hardest gaps: moving from controlled demos to reliable performance in live environments. The company said its work on physical robotic platforms has helped it accumulate practical experience in bridging simulation and reality across diverse operating conditions.

At the event, X Square demonstrated a series of live tasks. In one experience zone, a robot arranged flowers while adjusting its grip and motion in real time as stems shifted position under visual occlusion. The task was completed without pre-set trajectories, according to the company, and drew attention from both domestic and international media attending the event.

Even so, X Square acknowledged that the technology remains early. Wang said current systems can make mistakes that require remote intervention — such as placing slippers in the kitchen or pausing mid-task to process the next action. But he said the robots’ ability to operate continuously and generate new real-world data around the clock gives the system a path to rapid improvement.

That learning loop is central to the company’s next milestone: within 35 days, X Square plans to place its robots into everyday homes, underscoring the company’s long-term commitment to the home robotics sector.

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Technology

Manhattan Associates Announces Latest Enhancements for Retailers

Published

53 minutes ago

April 23, 2026

SYDNEY, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH), the global leader in supply chain commerce with unmatched AI capabilities, today announced major enhancements to Manhattan Active® Omni. These innovations are designed to help retailers maximise in-store and online sales while delivering best-in-class customer experiences across all touchpoints. New capabilities include embedded agentic AI for store associates and customer service teams, real-time sales, and fulfilment insights delivered natively within the user experience, and brand-new capabilities focused on maximising both revenue and profit when shipping from stores.

Manhattan announced commercial availability of three new AI agents, a Store Associate Agent, a Contact Centre Agent, and an OMS Configuration Agent, all available within the Manhattan Active Omni user interface, to support retailers’ selling and service teams. Using a natural language interface, these agents deliver immediate, actionable insights into store activity, sales trends, inventory, returns, and customer behaviour, helping associates and customer service teams resolve issues faster and provide more personalised support.

“Retailers are under constant pressure to move faster, operate smarter, and deliver seamless experiences across every touchpoint,” said Brian Kinsella, SVP of Product Management at Manhattan Associates. “Our latest updates reflect Manhattan’s ongoing commitment to delivering cutting edge artificial intelligence within our applications. Whether it’s the myriad machine learning algorithms present for years or our new Agentic AI and Fulfilment Simulation capabilities, we’ve long believed true AI needs to live within rather than alongside our applications. We’re proud to partner with a number of world class retailers on the design and development of these breakthrough technologies.”

Along with the newly announced agentic AI innovations, Manhattan Active® Point of Sale continues to advance with Customer Facing Display, a powerful new enhancement that brings shoppers into the checkout experience. Customers can view their cart in real time, attach their loyalty information to a transaction, enter shipping details, and choose how they’d like to receive their receipt, all from a dedicated display. Retailers can also capture additional customer input, ensuring greater accuracy and faster transactions at the point of sale, bridging the gap between associates and shoppers, and delivering a smoother, more engaging checkout experience.

Additionally, the Fulfilment Optimisation Simulation engine enables enterprises to model and compare alternative fulfilment strategies by balancing cost, speed, service level, and margin. It provides data-driven insights into split shipments, total fulfilment costs, location-level distribution, and key KPIs using a consistent set of orders for each strategy. Users can easily adjust optimisation rules, rerun simulations, and compare results side-by-side to understand the true impact of each change. The engine also supports “what if” scenario planning – allowing teams to anticipate constraints, evaluate operational shifts, and analyse trade-offs in a fully self-serve manner. By replaying historical or selected orders, businesses can continuously optimise fulfilment, uncover new savings, and drive meaningful performance improvements.

Together, these innovations reflect Manhattan’s continued focus on delivering practical, enterprise-ready advancements that help retailers move faster and operate with greater confidence.

Receive up-to-date product, customer and partner news directly from Manhattan on LinkedIn.

ENDS

ABOUT MANHATTAN ASSOCIATES:

Manhattan Associates is a global technology leader, providing supply chain and omnichannel commerce solutions with unmatched AI capabilities. We design, build and offer best-in-class, AI-powered, cloud-based solutions that drive resilience and efficiency for businesses. We enable enterprises to uniquely unify front-end sales with back-end supply chain execution.

Our commitment to innovation, cloud-native platform and API-first architecture create simpler experiences and faster paths to value for our customers. We empower them to preempt and react to emerging trends and global disruptions with technical expertise and operational confidence, transforming challenges into competitive advantage. For more information, please visit www.manh.com.

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SOURCE Manhattan Associates

Technology

Global Telecom Leaders to Convene in Singapore for Definitive Summit on AI-Native Transformation and Industry Reinvention

Published

53 minutes ago

April 23, 2026

SINGAPORE, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Twimbit, the global research and advisory firm, has finalized the strategic agenda for the Twimbit Telecom Summit & Awards 2026, scheduled for 21 May 2026 at the Capitol Theatre, Singapore. This high-level forum serves as a catalyst for addressing the shift toward AI-native architectures and digital sovereignty.

As the telecommunications sector moves beyond traditional connectivity toward a ‘Techco’ model, the 2026 summit will provide a framework for navigating margin pressure through structural innovation, with insights on ROIC growth, EBITDA optimization, and the integration of generative technologies into core business functions.

Architects of the Industry: Featured Perspectives

The 2026 summit features a curated lineup of visionaries redefining the telecom blueprint:

Soma Velayutham, VP Telecoms & AI, NvidiaWong Soon Nam, Chief Planning and Transformation Officer, TelekomselRajesh Chandiramani, CEO, ComvivaVikram Sinha, CEO, Indosat Ooredoo HutchisonAayush Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Development Officer, JioUlf Ewaldsson, Advisor, Indosat (Former President of Technology, T-Mobile)Juhi McClelland, Managing Partner, IBM Consulting APACManoj Menon, Founder & CEO, Twimbit

Strategic Forum: The Telecom Summit (08:00 – 14:35)

Designed as a high-impact leadership forum, the morning sessions will address three critical levers for telco success in 2026:

Accelerating the AI-Native Core: Leveraging generative AI to rebuild network operations and customer service modelsDigital Sovereignty & Infrastructure: Navigating data residency and localized AI infrastructure for competitive advantageGrowth Engineering & Customer Experience: Implementing high-touch service philosophies to drive customer lifetime value

The Recognition Gala: Twimbit Telecom Awards (17:00 – Late)

The day concludes with a prestigious black-tie awards ceremony, celebrating organisations and leaders demonstrating innovation and strategic transformation, using Twimbit’s proprietary research frameworks across Asia-Pacific.

Strategic Partnerships and Support

The event is supported by industry leaders. F5 joins as Strategic Partner, while Nokia and Comviva serve as Gold Sponsors, highlighting the role of secure infrastructure, customer experience, and digital financial solutions.

“We are at a point where incremental change is no longer sufficient,” said Manoj Menon, Founder & CEO of Twimbit. “This summit is about the reinvention of the telecom business model and providing a roadmap for leaders to architect the next era of digital intelligence.”

About Twimbit

A global tech and advisory firm powering customer success through research, innovation and community, Twimbit provides actionable insights that fuel innovation and growth through its proprietary research platform.

Media Contacts:
Vansh Sehgal
vansh@twimbit.com

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