Wuxi, Jiangsu Province is a birthplace of China's national industry and commerce and township enterprises as well as a cluster of private economy. This fertile land with profound industrial and commercial culture is home to a group of solid, low-key, faithful and aggressive Xi entrepreneurs dedicated to entity industry.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of pioneer entrepreneurs including Yang Zonglian, Yang Zonghan, Song Zongjing and Song Desheng was committed to saving the country through entity industry and contributed their own share for maintaining people’slivelihood and defending the country.
The Xi entrepreneurs in the 1970s and 1980s made fortune through entity industry in the spirit of working hard and overcoming all the difficulties in the wave of reform and opening up, wrote a splendid chapter of flourishing township enterprises and led intransformation of the local society from one with enough food and clothing to a well-off society, from an agricultural society to an industrial society.
Today, the Xi business group dominated by private entrepreneurs has inherited the companies founded by their forefathers and is still devoted to developing entity industry confronted with a heavy responsibility for technological innovation, transformation and development, increasingly complex domestic and international environments as well as fierce competition for resources and markets worldwide. But what is the original desire for their persistence?
Artisan Watch Repairer, Guardian of Time
After failing to be admitted into a university, Jiang Xipei followed his elderly brother to learn how to repair watches and clocks in Hangzhou. Before he left, he set a small goal for himself- earning 50,000 RMB.
On the workbench, Jiang picked up the tiny components with a small pair of tweezers and then put them at the exact positions followed by a series of nimble movements like adjusting the hands, making final checks, resetting the membrane, checking the time and in the end wiping the surface with deer velvet. In such a way was a broken watch repaired.
Behind his skilled handicraft was actually repeated practice as well as concentration on each component, each step and each clock. At that time, he was deeply convinced that only concentration on details and pursuit for better quality and perfection could attract more customers because public praise works better than any trophies. Just by doing this, he realized his small goal within less than one year.
The horologe is actually an apparatus with very precisely-structured and highly coordinated inner structure. Today, watchmakers are still a typical symbol for artisan spirit. Few instruments and devices have stricter production standard than horologes. That is why Mr. Jiang said that an artisan watch repairer is a guardian of time.
An Artisan Heart Brings About High Quality.
Only products created by extremely skilled craftsmen have top-level quality, which is deeply realized by the Swiss watchmakers. That is why they continue to calmly polish the details while most of the producers in the world pursue productivity and economic benefits through mechanization. They are not making products, but enjoying the dedicated and creative process.
This is quite enlightening for China's manufacturing since many Chinese people think cable production is all about easy procedures like wiredrawing and extrusion molding that can be completed by controlling machines.
But in fact, cable production involves equipment production, equipment test, raw material selection and purchase in the preparatory period, dial plate check,mold configuration and repeated angle, quality and shape tests in the production process as well as post-production tests. To do this, the front-line workers of the Far East Cable Co., Ltd. must know rich technological theories and master a variety of core techniques with an artisan heart strict with the production procedure and responsible for the quality to ensure the “high quality” of the company and serve national fine projects.
In the early design phase of the Shanghai World Financial Center, the power substations needed to be installed at different places on the upper floors of the building according to its power supply plan, so 10 kV cableswere supposed to be installed from rock-bottom high voltage substation to sub-transformers on upper floors, which could effectively reduce internal space occupation. This design rejected the traditional low voltage-oriented power supply system, greatly shortening the low-voltage cable path, reducing power loss and maximizing the safety and reliability of power supply.
However, it had never happened in China and seldom abroad before to install lifting cables in such a tall building through underground horizontal installation, vertical installation and horizontal installation on the top floors. At first, the Japanese investor MORI Building tended to introduce the 10kV lifting cables from Japan's Fujikura Cable Company.
At that time, the Far East technical team invented a new type of 10kV lifting cables in accordance with the power supply plan through reducing the weight of the cables and improving its bending capability. The new-type lifting cables passed all the performance tests with the help of the Shanghai Cable Research Institute, the Shanghai Jiaotong University and related testing institutions and got common approval of the authorities from the domestic cable industry and architecture industry. At last, the Far East Cable Co., Ltd. was selected by the investors and constructors of the Shanghai World Financial Center.
One of the 10KV lifting cables provided by the Far East Cable Co., Ltd. for the Shanghai World Financial Center is 708 meters long and weighs 14 tons with a lifting height from 131 meters to 400 meters above the ground. In the past 10 years, the cables have never broken down.
For the Far East, their priority is not making money, but seeking high quality with an artisan heart. They do their best to change “okay” into “best”, change "manufacturing" into "smart manufacturing" and change “products” into “fine products”.
An artisan industrialist should have a heart used to solitude.
In 2014, the Far East Cable Co., Ltd. became Tesla’s only appointed supplier of wires and cables specially used in Tesla’s cars and charging equipment. Against the backdrop of universal stock price drop in Shanghai and Shenzhen, the company saw a continuous increase in its stock price pushed by its new energy vehicle project.
The key component of the Tesla car- 18650-type lithium ion battery drew wide attention hence.
18650-type lithium ion battery is more power-intensive, stable and consistent, effectively reducing the cost of the battery system compared with its counterparts. Besides, it is small-sized, increasingly controllable and safe. That is why Tesla finally chose the ternary lithium battery after trying over 300 types of batteries in the market.
In 2015, the Far East Smart Energy wholly acquired the Foster New Energy whose 18650-type cylindrical lithium-ion battery has a daily output of 1.2 million ranked at first on the sales list domestically and third in the world only behind Samsung and Panasonic. The Far East Foster New Energy Co., Ltd. is among the fourth batch of enterprises added onto the directory of enterprises meeting the Standard Conditions for the Automobile Power Storage Battery Industry. It has signed a strategic cooperative agreement of power batteries for 10,000 new energy blade electric vehicles with Zotye, a pioneer in promoting industrialization of NEVs in China, to create a national NEV brand.
The NEV industry is a capital-intensive, technology-intensive and talent-intensive industry. Someone says:” You should advise a man to invest in the NEV industry if you love him or hate him.” Jiang joked:" I have invested in both NEV and its battery maybe because I'm loved and hated at the same time.”
In February this year, the Far East Smart Energy established a joint venture with the century-old car brand Detroit Electric, marching into the medium- and high-range electric vehicle sector. It is planed that their first medium- and high-range electric vehicle comes off the line in 2019 and the venture has an output of 100,000 electric vehicles in 2021 and one million in 2030.
In fact, all these mentioned above are based on the Far East’s strategy of “Main Business plus Investment”. The company will mainly develop their main business- “Smart Energy Experts” project and invest in entity industries like smart energy, mass health, mass consumption, mass culture, food and beverage, advanced manufacturing, industrial automation if their resources and conditions permit. In this way, they can not only develop their own company but also provide opportunities for small or start-up companies.
Nowadays, many people are fascinated at the crazy real estate market, admired at miraculous Internet and lured by magical finance. What holds people in the manufacturing sector is definitely a heart used to solitude in addition to money.
In Jiang’s view, it takes an artisan heart to endorse entity industry. Endorsing the entity industry is the very mission that the new-generation Xi entrepreneurs should inherit and extend.
