Modem industry first began in Tibet in the late 1950s, with the appearance of more than 10 new fields of production, including electric power, mining, wool spinning, forestry, food processing, printing, building materials and machine processing. Today there are more than 260 medium- and small-sized State-owned enterprises employing 51,000 workers.

In the mid-1950s efforts were made to cope with the power shortage problem resulting from Tibet's lack of coal and oil resources; the region built its first publicly owned electric enterprise, the Lhasa Power Plant. Subsequently, the State invested in building the nation's largest megawatt-class geothermal power plant at Yangbajain. More recently work has begun on the Yamzhog Yumco Pump Storage Power Station and the Chalong Power Plant. The former, involving 2.014 billion yuan in investment from the Central Government, has an installed generating capacity of 90,000 kilowatts with an annual generating capacity of 81.4527 million kwh. It went into operation in 1997. In 1996, Tibet's installed generating capacity reached 194,000 kilowatts, and the amount of electricity generated 515 million kwh. By 1998, there were 364 small hydraulic power plants, with a combined generating capacity of 132,500 kilowatts, in Tibet.

In the field of mining, Tibet has acquired an annual mining capacity of 11.2 tons of chromite, 1,500 tons of tinkalite and 16,000 tons of boromagnesite. The Norbusa Chromite Mine and the Shannan Chromite Mine are now in operation.