Recently, the ninth batch of Shandong Province’s list of individual manufacturing champion companies was announced. Hongsheng Rubber Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Shandong Huasheng Rubber Group, was successfully selected with its core product “self-repairing silent tires”. It has become another important achievement of Guangrao County’s deep cultivation of subdivided tracks and promotion of high-end industrial development, highlighting the hard-core strength of the county’s manufacturing industry.
“This is our latest flagship product. The tread formula has been exclusively customized and introduces the most cutting-edge solution-polymerized styrene-butadiene rubber and highly filled silica.” In the exhibition hall of Hongsheng Rubber Technology Co., Ltd., the company’s general manager Chen Jianjun pointed to the new tire and introduced it.
This product not only greatly improves the silent effect, control performance, and anti-wet skid performance, but also significantly reduces rolling resistance. The product quality is close to the level of international first-tier brands and accurately meets the current development needs of the new energy automobile industry.
The road to innovation is by no means smooth, and technological breakthroughs depend on perseverance.
Faced with common industry problems such as fast wear, high noise, and high production energy consumption in the research and development of new energy vehicle tires, Hongsheng Rubber also faced bottlenecks such as a lack of high-end talents and insufficient innovation capabilities.
The pain point of enterprises is the direction of government services.
Guangrao County takes the initiative and implements precise policies, actively building an industry-university-research collaborative innovation platform, and jointly building the Guangrao Rubber Industry Research Institute with Qingdao University of Science and Technology, gathering the power of expert think tanks to focus on key technologies that are stuck in the rubber industry, and injecting strong momentum into the innovation and development of enterprises.
Relying on the technical support of university think tanks, Hongsheng Rubber continues to increase investment in research and development, and has launched a variety of innovative tire products such as ultra-quiet series and self-repair series, successfully filling the gaps in market segments.
The success of Hongsheng Rubber is also inseparable from the precise cultivation and targeted empowerment of the local industry and information technology departments.
“We have established a complete set of evaluation systems based on the company’s economic indicators, R&D innovation capabilities, market share and other key indicators.” Shang Juan, deputy director of the Guangrao County Industrial and Information Service Center, said that Hongsheng Rubber’s self-repairing silent tires currently have a market share of 32% in the province, leading the country in technical level. It is these quantitative indicators that help them quickly identify high-potential enterprises.
The prosperity of the industry will lead to the prosperity of the county, and the strong industry will make the county strong.
Guangrao County has been continuously improving its enterprise cultivation mechanism, and has built a gradient cultivation and growth system of “innovative small and medium-sized enterprises – specialized and special new enterprises – ‘gazelle’ enterprises – ‘little giant’ enterprises – individual champion enterprises”. By establishing three types of enterprise lists, recommended, promoted and reserve enterprises, it accurately tracks the development trend of enterprises, guides enterprises to deepen product innovation, expand market space, build high-quality brands, and promotes more enterprises to climb “new” and lead development in subdivided fields.
As of now, Guangrao County has 14 provincial-level manufacturing champion companies, of which tire industry companies account for 50%, becoming an important support for the high-quality development of the county economy.
In the next step, Guangrao County will continue to focus on industrial upgrading, deepen industry-university-research cooperation, strengthen policy support and precise services, promote the transformation of rubber tires and other advantageous industries into high-end, intelligent, and green industries, cultivate more individual champions in the manufacturing industry, and inject stronger impetus into the high-quality development of the county economy.
