No. * Financial Weekly: [Cover Story] The Big Machine Sets Off

Text: CBN reporter Wang Hongchao, Shang Qinshuo, Zhang Xin

At the Fukushima*5656 nuclear power plant in Japan, at 1 p.m. on March 31, a large red steel creature raised its 62-meter-long arm and began to pour water into the nuclear waste pool of Unit 1 in an effort to cool the reactor. The long arm and the water jet it spewed out formed a huge parabola.

By any measure, it's a big guy. Its robotic arm is nearly as tall as an average 20-story residential building, weighs 50 tons, and has an engine displacement of 12.8 liters – the displacement of an economy family sedan is usually 1.6 liters, and the displacement of the *5660 luxury sedan on the market is only 6.0 liters.

It's a pump truck. It is composed of a pump body and a conveying pipe, and is a kind of machinery that uses pressure to continuously transport concrete along the pipeline. This kind of pump truck is mainly used for concrete conveying during the construction of high-rise buildings.

with fixation on the groundTow pumpIn contrast, the efficiency of a pump truck that can come and go freely will be higher. If the arm length of the pump truck is more than 60 meters, buildings with less than 20 floors can be easily poured. The total annual production of pump trucks above 60 meters in the world is only a few hundred, and the average price of each pump is more than 1 million US dollars. Of course, for the higher floors, the pump truck cannot reach it, and the fixed trailer pump can still be used.

The pump truck is from Sany Heavy Industry, a construction machinery company based in the central Chinese city of Changsha. When people think of the city, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a popular television station in China. But Sany has also been in the public limelight, five years ago when the private equity investment fund Carlyle launched the acquisition of XCMG Machinery, the president of Sany Heavy Industry raised fierce objections to Wenbo.

At the time, Xiang Wenbo believed that Carlyle's $250 million acquisition of an 85% stake in XCMG was very different from the valuation of the capital market and the industry, and the reasonable price should be 8 to 12 times this price. He wrote in his blog at the time: You can sell anything, but you can't sell the country.

Xiang Wenbo, a college student in the 1980s, joined a state-owned enterprise after graduation and was the director of a state-owned valve factory before joining Sany. Like many Chinese entrepreneurs, he mixes patriotism with confidence in his business, and he is surprisingly strong. And many people suspect that Xiang Wenbo's words and deeds are just to prevent the emergence of a strong competitor.

In the past five years, Sany Heavy Industry's annual sales have increased from 4.574 billion yuan that year to 33.955 billion yuan in 2010.

Construction machinery manufacturing has always been an industry with a degree of openness of 5661 in China. In the past 20 years, Sany has developed from a start-up company to a company with a market value of more than 140 billion yuan and ranks among the top 50 construction machinery companies in the world. The Boston Consulting Group of the United States has ranked the shareholder returns of global listed companies in the past five years, and Sany Heavy Industry ranks first in the world; Its parent company, Sany Group, has also become a large domestic private enterprise with sales of more than 50 billion yuan.

From November last year to January this year, Sany Heavy Industry's excavators broke the advantages of international brands and became the domestic market sales volume * 5656. The excavator is considered to be a product with a technical content of *5661 in construction machinery, which is equivalent to a small robot. In 2010, the number of pump trucks in China was more than 20,000 units, and the sales volume of Sany Heavy Industry reached more than 4,000 units.

Herman Simon, chairman of Simon-Kucher Partners, said he was stunned after visiting Sany Heavy Industry's Changsha plant last year. In an article published in the Financial Times, he said that this class-of-class modern factory was only comparable to the Scania factory he had seen in Stockholm. Sany also told him that the company would assemble its own concrete pumps on the world's best truck chassis.

Sany's development is largely due to China's large-scale investment in infrastructure construction over the past five years. This not only allows domestic construction machinery enterprises to develop at a high speed, but also has the opportunity to take advantage of the economic crisis that began in 2008 to carry out international mergers and acquisitions. Zoomlion, a state-owned construction machinery company in Changsha, which is located in Changsha with Sany Heavy Industry, acquired Italy's CIFA, the world's third-largest concrete machinery manufacturer, in 2008.

In 2009, China accounted for 25% of the global mechanical engineering market, almost twice as much as Germany.

In March this year, Sany Heavy Industry participated in the Las Vegas International Construction Machinery Expo with 21 exhibits, of which more than 90% met American standards, and the pump truck also won the "Top 100 Products of the Year" award from Construction Equipment magazine. In 2005, when it participated in the 5655 event in the field of international construction machinery for 5656 times, several exhibits were pulled back because they did not meet American standards.

Japan also has a world-class construction machinery manufacturer, but now they need to turn to this Chinese manufacturer.

On March 18, when it was almost time to get off work, Sun Bin, overseas marketing director of Sany Heavy Industry, received a call from Japan and learned that Tokyo Electric Power Company wanted to buy a pump truck with an arm length of more than 60 meters to cool down Unit 1. The environment near Unit 1 is more complex than the other two reactors, with an obstacle with a vertical height of 46 meters, from which there is still a distance of more than 10 meters to the reactor, and a pump truck of at least 60 meters is required to carry out water injection operations.

The extra-long pump trucks are produced to order, and you can't buy them if you want them. TEPCO's luck was that Sany Heavy Industry happened to have a unit in stock at the time, which was temporarily stored by a Middle Eastern customer due to a delay, and they were happy to give the pump truck to TEPCO.

Transporting a large machine of this size can be a hassle, especially in and out of two countries in a short period of time.

The delivery of pump trucks generally takes 1 week to 10 days under the premise of just catching up with the shipping schedule, and it takes up to a month to find these unconventional ships. This time, even if the customs, traffic and police of the two countries gave the green light all the way, it took six days to travel from Changsha to Osaka, Japan.

On the night of March 18, Sany overhauled and debugged the pump truck overnight, and drove to Shanghai by an experienced driver the next afternoon. He was accompanied by a 10-ton container truck crammed with spare parts. The pump truck*5661 traveled at only 80 kilometers per hour, and it took a day for the two vehicles to arrive at the port of Shanghai. COSCO was willing to deliver it free of charge, but the Suzhou on the mission had never delivered cargo of this volume and weight, and had to lay thick planks on the bilge to ensure safety.

After the pump truck arrived in Japan, a police car drove the road, and because of the oil shortage, the Japanese side prepared diesel fuel at three gas stations in advance. On the evening of the 24th, the pump truck finally arrived in Chiba Prefecture. Four mechanical engineers and nine nuclear power plant workers from Sany were already waiting there.

Normally, it takes six months of training for a driver to be qualified to drive a pump truck, but this time it was only three days. While the training and simulation training were carried out, the Japanese side added a water outlet to the robotic arm, increasing its length to 67 meters, and also installed a 360-degree camera and a radiation intensity meter.

On the 31st, the pump truck began to fill Unit 1 with water. *After 5,656 water injections, the temperature of the reactor dropped significantly, and the Japanese people nicknamed the pump truck the big giraffe.

This is not Sany Heavy Industry*5656 times appeared in major international disasters. Last year, Sany Heavy Industry's 400-ton crawler crane participated in the rescue of a mining disaster in Chile, and 33 miners were trapped 700 meters underground for more than two months, and all of them were rescued.

Playing a role in similar events has attracted international attention and has become part of Sany's entry into the international market. Since 2006, Sany has invested in the establishment of factories and R&D centers in India, including the United States, Germany and Brazil. On the one hand, it can absorb local talents, and at the same time, it can also reduce the transportation cost of parts and vehicle products.

Yi Xiaogang, executive president of Sany Heavy Industry and a scientist, said in an interview with *5656 Financial Weekly that the company's response and delivery speed have a lot to do with internationalization. In the process of communication with Japan, the company played a role as a bridge. Use.

"It's definitely a plus for our brand. But the prerequisite for assistance is that we have the capacity, he said.

Even without Chile and Japan, Sany's international popularity is growing. It is a frequent visitor to the three industry exhibitions of *5655 internationally, it has the world's first ultra-high pressure concrete pumping technology, and has also set the Guinness World Record for long-arm pump trucks twice, and still holds the record of 72 meters.

Yi Xiaogang said that no matter in terms of sales, product price or competitiveness, Sany is the world's 5656 in the field of concrete machinery.

At the beginning, Sany Heavy Industry, which was unable to increase production due to the constraints of core component suppliers, decided to take the path of research and development. Until now, most of the parts of Sany products are still produced by world-class suppliers, such as the chassis is usually from Volvo, Mercedes and Isuzu, the diesel engine is from Deutz, the hydraulic press is from Bosch Rexroth, and the controller is from Siemens. However, the core boom and pumping system are developed and manufactured by Sany Heavy Industry itself.

The boom accounts for a large part of the manufacturing cost of the pump truck. In the late 1990s, the cost of an imported 36-meter-long boom exceeded 1 million yuan, and the cost was reduced to more than 200,000 yuan after Yi Xiaogang and his team successfully developed it.

The benefits are obvious, but sometimes the risks are not unavoidable. In 2007, the world-record 66-meter pump truck broke and crashed into the cab while exhibiting in Germany. Although there were no casualties, the company's explanation for the alleged operational error was questioned.

Wang Allen, deputy dean of the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of Central South University, said that from the basic knowledge of mechanical engineering, the higher the more difficult, the higher the easier it is to fall, the worse the reliability and stability, it is very difficult to do more than one meter high, if it is higher than 60 meters, the technical difficulty and cost of the pump truck have gone up, and it is not commonly used. At present, it is more used in the construction of forty or fifty meters.

At present, Sany Heavy Industry's pump trucks of more than 60 meters have about dozens of sales at home and abroad. A research report by China Merchants Securities said that compared with the trailer pump, the pump truck is a high-end product, with better mobility and high efficiency, and can directly hit the concrete to the target, or it can be quickly transferred, and is widely used in urban construction, roads and bridges, electricity, energy and other concrete projects, so the gross profit margin is also high, Sany Heavy Industry is mainly positioned in the high-end market of concrete machinery, the domestic market share of the pump truck is 5656, and the trailer pump reaches 30%, and its price is slightly higher than that of competitors. Due to the high proportion of pump truck sales, the gross profit margin of Sany Concrete Machinery is close to 45%.

The pricing of Sany products is a little lower than that of international brands, and significantly higher than similar domestic products. Sany can quickly develop new products, from concrete machinery to cranes and excavators and other fields, first incubated by the parent company Sany Group, and put into the listed company Sany Heavy Industry when the business is mature.

At least a dozen brand-new pump trucks are neatly parked on the left side of the entrance of the Sany Heavy Factory in Xingsha County, Changsha, Hunan Province. Whenever an important guest arrives, the three pump trucks will fully stretch out their mechanical arms in the center of the intersection of the gate, forming a three-dimensional trident in the air, which is the symbol of Sany Heavy Industry. Last year, the company responded to Mercedes-Benz's challenge to the trademark through legal proceedings in the United Kingdom, obtaining its legal right to use it in Europe.

It is only a 10-minute drive from Yuanda Group, another well-known private enterprise in Hunan Province. When the company's sales reached 100 million yuan, Liang Wengen, the main founder of Sany Heavy Industry, was troubled why Yuanda could achieve more than 200 million yuan, but Sany stagnated. At that time, he was mainly engaged in the welding materials business. After some research, he selected construction machinery as the company's main business. He feels that, just like the product volume of construction machinery, the companies participating in the competition in the field of construction machinery are also behemoths. Caterpillar of the United States and Komatsu of Japan have a market value and sales of hundreds of billions of yuan, and are the most important manufacturing enterprises in their respective countries.

Yi Xiaogang, who was in charge of R&D, left the Beijing Institute of Automation in 1995 to join Sany because he wanted to find a platform to realize his ideas. He had a good conversation with Liang Wengen, they are both from Hunan, they are college students in their respective hometowns, they have ideals and enthusiasm for doing a great job, and they are not satisfied with the stability of state-owned units.

In many things similar to share reform and technological transformation, Sany Heavy Industry has demonstrated the flexibility that state-owned enterprises do not have. Guo Yuanhua, sales director of the CRM division of Interstellar Network, which developed a customer management system for Sany, said that XCMG and Zoomlion, which used a fully automated network platform to process customer service, accessories and maintenance information in the field of construction machinery, have not been able to use this system until now. Such a big paradigm shift is more difficult for state-owned enterprises.

And to maintain high-speed growth, it requires a large number of R&D personnel and engineers. But the early idealistic alliances and the later poaching of people from competitors could not satisfy the current Sany Heavy Industry. This year alone, the company has signed 4,000 graduates, and there are not so many mature engineers in society to recruit, so Sany can only rely on its own training. After these graduates join the company, the ratio of R&D personnel will rise to 6:1, and after about a year of intensive training, they will become mature and usable engineers.

Compared with managers, R&D personnel have a higher starting salary, and the upward path in front of them is clearer, which the company says is a *5655 benefit for employees. From engineers to users to scientists, these titles are closely related to salary and benefits, and there is no limit to the number of scientists, and there can be more than one scientist.

For local and surrounding college students in and around Hunan Province, as well as talents who want to return home to work, Sany is becoming one of the better choices. At a job fair not far from the factory, Tian Lu told *5656 Financial Weekly: Sany is a large enterprise in the field of construction machinery, I want to go home, and some classmates work here, so I will try. He worked for a well-known multinational company in Beijing for 5 years and had not yet quit his job when he applied for the job.

And in the showroom on the first floor of the office building, a group of students from Hunan University are visiting to decide whether to work for Sany in the future. Hu Kui, a student majoring in mechanical and electrical engineering, said that he believes that Sany's R&D and design level is very high, but there is a gap between the manufacturing accuracy and international brands.

Hunan University, Hunan Normal University and Central South University together provide talents for Sany, and at the same time, it has also created a pattern of three domestic first-class construction machinery manufacturers in Changsha: Sany, Zoomlion and Sunward. Wang Allen, deputy dean of the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of Central South University, said that the founder and chairman of Sunward Intelligence is an in-service professor of the institute, and there is more than one enterprise founded by the in-service teachers of the institute with sales of more than 100 million. Wang Chuanfu is a Chinese entrepreneur that Liang Wengen* admires, and both of them graduated from Central South University.

Even if companies in the field of construction machinery do the world's *5656, it is difficult to be known by the general public. But in China, Sany was already in the spotlight for a huge controversy before it became commercially successful. *Typical examples are the 2005 split share reform and Carlyle's acquisition of XCMG in 2006.

Sany's founder, Liang Wengen, is very low-key and almost never gives interviews, but now he has taken a break from the company's day-to-day affairs and is only responsible for major decisions, such as donating pump trucks to Japan and participating in the Chilean rescue. However, Sany, represented by Xiang Wenbo, the president of the company, gives a high-profile impression. Doubts about Carlyle's acquisition of XCMG made him famous. "I'm not a nationalist, everything I say, everything I want to do, including national rulings, is in line with the current laws of international business." He explained his aggressive performance.

As it turned out, XCMG was worth much more than $250 million.

Nowadays, from skyscrapers in the city to high-speed rail construction projects, from coastal cities in the east to emerging cities in the west, Sany Heavy Industry's products are in short supply. Its equipment is also increasingly being adopted in Dubai, UAE, India, Russia, and some countries in Africa and South America.

On March 28, 2010, Sany Heavy Industry's machine completed the pouring of the floor of the Shanghai Tower under construction in Shanghai. The 632-metre-tall building will be the 5,656th tallest building in China. And at the end of 2007, Sany Heavy Industry's machines set a new height of 492 meters when pumping concrete for the Shanghai World Financial Center. At that time, Yi Xiaogang said that we can pump as high as the design unit can design the building. The following year, Sany completed the concrete pumping of the Guangzhou TV Tower at an altitude of 610 meters.

As long as the product can be produced, it can be sold. In order to increase production capacity, Sany has built new factories in Changsha, Kunshan and other production bases to increase the proportion of automation equipment applications. The No. 18 factory in Changsha is in the process of equipment installation and commissioning, where welding robots from ABB and processing machines from Mazak and DMG, as well as robots from Huaheng and laser cutting machines developed by Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. Sany Heavy Industry said that the No. 18 factory is a modern factory in Asia*5655.

Another purpose of increasing automation is to deal with possible labor shortages and rising costs in the future.

Yi Xiaogang said that it is difficult to speculate when Sany will become a world-class construction machinery manufacturer, but there are some criteria to measure, market value and sales must reach at least hundreds of billions of yuan, have core intellectual property rights, and the brand is recognized. He said the gap exists across the board, but *5655 is the brand.

On April 3, "the filling of the big giraffe in Fukushima came to an end. Xiang Wenbo updated the 40th and 41st messages since registration on Weibo. Unit 1 needs to finish the sewage treatment in the fuel pool, which is estimated to take 10 days, during which time the pump truck will not be filled with water. However, because the site boom is long, the big giraffe monitors the scene with a camera and a radiometer mounted on the fifth robotic arm, which replaces aerial photography.

The performance of the big giraffe won an order for 30 pump trucks from TEPCO. Shi Yiqing, from Sany Heavy Industry's Publicity and Culture Department, said: "The donation plays a role in building a bridge, and it is not surprising that [TEPCO continues] to buy. Besides, 30 pump trucks is not too much.