SPARK Education - Expectations for 'Little Giant' to Grow into a Giant

With the rapid development of China's equipment manufacturing industry, the current national standards are no longer able to meet the demand for electric heating alloys in the high-end field, and Shougang Gitane is mainly imported from Sweden by China. In 2017, Shougang Gitane successfully developed SCRHZ high-performance iron chromium aluminum alloy and achieved industrialization in 2020. This product can serve in a high-temperature environment of 1400 degrees Celsius for a long time, and there are few companies that can maintain its production strength.

In the past, the domestic high-end electric heating alloy market was monopolized by foreign enterprises, and technology and alloy quality were easily overlooked. In fact, high-tech enterprises are calculating based on quality and quantity, and the value comes from the scarcity of technology. For example, the raw material cost for producing SCRHZ high-performance iron chromium aluminum alloy is not high, but before the successful research and development of Shougang Jitai An, similar products in the domestic market relied on imports, with a selling price of 560000 yuan per ton. After successfully developing SCRHZ high-performance iron chromium aluminum alloy, Shougang Jitai An reduced the price of this product to the highest price of 280000 yuan per ton, directly squeezing foreign products out of the Chinese market. ”Liu Zuoren said.

Nowadays, on the one hand, Shougang Gitane is facing a new market situation with a "low-end restructuring" approach, and meeting different market demands with "products+services"; On the other hand, there are "shortcomings" in the self-development of Shougang Gitane - after the restructuring, state-owned and private enterprises are pressing on the hearts of Liu Zuoren, the Party Secretary, Chairman, and General Manager of Shougang Gitane. Liu Zuoren made a new discovery in this regard. Among them, the collaborative cooperation of putting employees first and customers first, forming a close industrial integration relationship, is his development philosophy that he adheres to. Liu Zuoren, born in the 1970s, discovered that employees had shifted from "asking me to do it" to "I want to do it" and actively carried out industry optimization and upgrading. Based on this, he changed the original development model of independent development, production and manufacturing, and independent sales, and began to launch a development model of "industry academia business" integration, which closely integrates with upstream and downstream enterprises, research institutes, and universities, promotes the integration of "industry production" with advantageous enterprises in specific fields, solves pain points in the process of process development, and fundamentally solves the technical support problem of industrial upgrading with relatively low cost and relatively short time.

In addition, thanks to decades of practical experience and a profound understanding of the characteristics of electric heating alloy materials, the high-performance electric heating alloy products developed by Shougang Gitane not only meet the demand of the domestic high-end market, but also replace similar foreign products. With excellent performance, advanced similar products from countries such as Belgium have also "survived". Even foreign representatives felt the pressure during business negotiations with Shougang Gitane.

In January 2024, Shougang Gitane held a technical quality work meeting, clarifying the strategic goal of developing and industrializing high-performance electric heating alloys to replace imported ones. After more than two years of effort, they have made their products serve emerging industries such as photovoltaics, chips, and energy storage, and have also reserved room for growth for the company's development. At present, in the field of high-performance electric heating materials, Shougang Gitane "SPARK" brand is also the only domestic brand that can compete with international brands. It can be foreseen that with the breakthroughs in key areas such as quality and artificial intelligence in China's electric heating alloy industry, the "hat" of electric heating alloys that are not high-end and cutting-edge will eventually be removed. And the true giant, Shougang Gitane, may still have a difficult road ahead, but this does not affect their confidence and ambition - keeping an eye on Gitane's plan, holding the strict production standards and strategic height of the country's "14th Five Year Plan", striving to achieve "50% of new product revenue" by 2024, and steadily building a powerful army in the domestic market.