Fengyuan Tire Used to be An Underdog

Shandong Fengyuan Tire Manufacturing Co., Ltd. was called a new “wingceltis” by people in Yicheng district, Zaozhuang, Shandong province, as it grows in spite of adversity like a wingceltis and creates wonders of life.

Nibbana for New Life

Nibbana for new life is a best phrase describing the changes on Fengyuan Tire over the past three years.

“At the beginning of 2013, when we entered Fengyuan Tire, the company had stopped production for three to four years. We saw only dilapidated factories, rusty equipment and wild grasses in the yard.”

Wang Zhongjiang, general manager of Fengyuan Tire, said the company, which was established in 2006 with an overall investment over 600 million yuan was a sore point of local government then.

Under the circumstances of serious overcapacity in global tire industry, intensive market competition and severe trade barriers in the European and North American markets, Bayi Rubber Co., Ltd.’s, a subsidiary of Shandong Energy Zaozhuang Mining Group Co., Ltd., acquisition and reshuffling of Fengyuan Tire was considered a bad idea.

Before that, two renowned tire companies from Qingdao and Hong Kong had given up, while Bayi Rubber was a real newcomer in the tire industry.

Facing the challenges, Zaozhuang Mining didn’t flinch. It adopted a differentiated development strategy and aimed at the high-end market.

Centering on the target, the company bought advanced equipment from Holland, Italy, Germany, Japan, and the U.S..

Wang said, the VMI automatic molding machine made in Holland was over 15 million yuan per unit, and we bought 14 machines once.

The significant reform resulted in great success.

The production system of the company resumed on July 8, 2013; 1,000 Fengyuan tires were exported overseas for first time on Sep. 24 in the same year to Malaysia.

The company’s outputs and sales volumes in 2014 and 2015 both grew by multiple times; in 2016, the output capacity of the company totaled 10 million semi-steel radial tires.

Fengyuan Tire started a new journey.

Be an Industrial Leader

There is a law in the semi-steel tire sector, the sales volume of six million is a break-even point.

Young Fengyuan Tire broke the law. In the first half of 2016, it sold 2.28 million semi-steel tires and the profit totaled 2.19 million yuan.

People in Fengyuan Tire realized that resuming production was just a beginning, to be an industrial leader rather than a follower is key to realize sustainable development.

The company focused on the rubber mixing technology, cooperated with renowned domestic researchers and jointly developed a new technology of “one-off mixing technology”, and solved the problems of high costs and low quality existed in old technologies.

It costed the company 27 months to success.

On Mar. 5, 2016, the research result was authenticated as “internationally advanced” by Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China.

Whiling working on the rubber mixing technology, another internationally advanced technology of the company, application of carbon nanometer materials in tires, was applied in its tire production.

With the support of core technologies, Fengyuan Tire put a variety of unique products into the market, including 10 series and nearly 600 specifications.

Over the past two years, Fengyuan Tire received 31 national patents and become of the first 23 companies meeting the Access Conditions of Tire Industry issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.