Electric Heating Alloy - A Gathering of One Factory, One Road, and One Spirit

How would a company that produces electric heating alloys define it? A product or a brand? For Shougang Gitane, electric heating alloy is more like a hot imprint - born and alive because of it.

In 2001, Tao Ke, who had just graduated from university with a major in materials, came to Beijing Shougang Steel Wire Factory located in Changping District, Beijing and became a technician in the factory. More than 20 years later, Tao Ke, who has become the deputy general manager of Shougang Gitane, still vividly remembers those days.

'Loss' was a true reflection of the company at that time, the most difficult time being three months without salary. The worried old man in the factory faced the new college students, dug out the materials accumulated by the enterprise for decades and already covered in dust, and earnestly taught them to use their intelligence and talent to make the enterprise's products good. From these materials, they felt the charm of this enterprise for the first time and also developed aspirations and confidence for its future.

In 1926, the world's first patent for iron chromium aluminum alloy was developed in Sweden. From 1935 to 1945, Sweden, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Japan successively achieved industrialization of iron chromium aluminum electric heating alloys. In 1960, the Soviet Union imposed an economic blockade on our country, tore up contracts, cut off technical assistance, and withdrew experts, which brought great difficulties to our country's just begun economic construction. During the difficult period of national economic construction, hundreds of employees at Haidian Electric Wire Factory carried forward the spirit of hard work and self-reliance, started from scratch, and worked together with metallurgical experts to overcome numerous difficulties. They successfully trial produced the molybdenum electric heating alloy for railways, which had already been discontinued by the Soviet Union and urgently needed for China's economic development, filling the gap in China's metallurgical industry production. Afterwards, the factory was officially transformed into the Beijing Steel Wire Factory, which specializes in producing special alloy steel wire industrial raw materials such as electric heating wire, resistance wire, and strip (the predecessor of Beijing Shougang Steel Wire Factory, renamed as Beijing Shougang Gitane New Materials Co., Ltd. in 2008).

In that era, in order to ensure foolproof measures, factories were equipped with powerful lead melting furnaces, and even each workshop had a large column grid, with process supervisors assigned to each job position. Against this backdrop, in just 10 years from 1970 to 1980, they achieved over 200 scientific research results and made significant contributions to China's chemical, transportation, military, instrumentation, and other infrastructure projects, becoming the skilled craftsmen of the "old man bridge" in the metallurgical industry. But in the face of Gitane in the new era, the glory of the planned economy era is only a step by step footprint compared to the wave of market economy.

In the 1970s, under the leadership of the socialist cooperation, the steel plant sent many engineers to the south to help build the factory. The newly built plant and the steel plant were using the same technology, and even the equipment was supplied by Beijing. At that time, the shortcomings of a group of private gold and steel plants were immediately exposed in the steel mills. At that time, steel mills were still dragging the mindset of planned economy, producing all the products that the country wanted, and even accommodating the materials used for the mainspring of mechanical watches. However, the market demand for these products is not strong. On the other hand, Gitane is a production enterprise with a wide variety of products, and even if they want to produce more products, they cannot compete with southern enterprises. For a while, how to develop the steel plant has become a problem that troubles them.

In 2002, the customer representative of Shougang Gitane found that the market was very popular when visiting customers in the south. At that time, some southern cities had just become popular with small household heaters, which put forward new demands for electric heating materials - finer, more refined, and softer. More importantly, there is no such product in the domestic market. Therefore, changing the small-scale and multi variety business structure, focusing on the field of electric heating alloys, while closely following the market and strengthening research and development, became a new choice for the factory to try to answer the development positioning question at that time.

Adjusting the product structure is a benchmark for the industry leader, Kanthal Corporation of Sweden. Shougang Gitane discovered that in order to have development, it is necessary to cultivate future "seed" products - high-performance electric heating alloys. After years of research and development, in 2017, Shougang Gitane "took out" SCRHZ high-performance electric heating alloy, which was put into the high-end market for experimentation. In the following two years, it was the time for customer inspection and also a big test about the future of Shougang Gitane. During those two years, they didn't make any phone calls for a month to inquire about the effectiveness of the experiment. After a long wait, the market finally gave back good news - Shougang Gitane's high-performance electric heating alloy is no different from similar materials from industry leaders, and has finally been launched for promotion.

In just a few years, the market share of Shougang Gitane high-performance electric heating alloy has now ranked second in the world and first in China. Our country's electric heating alloy production enterprises mainly supply low-end products, with more than 50 enterprises in Jiangsu, Shanghai, Hebei, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Hebei and other places as the main suppliers.