The general manager of International Composites accepted an exclusive interview with the media: Leading the international material innovation trend with China's application scenarios!
Located on the banks of the Yangtze River in Dadukou District, Chongqing, Yuntianhua International Composites can be called "the most low-key global leading enterprise in Chongqing". The company has been deeply involved in the glass fiber industry for more than 30 years, and the glass fiber it produces is exported to dozens of countries and regions at home and abroad. In 2024, the sales volume reached 1.09 million tons, with sales of approximately 7.2 billion yuan, making it one of the top three glass fiber giants in the industry.
Reporter Liao Yangyi: What is the core competitiveness of a company located in Chongqing to be the world's top?
Wei Zecong, General Manager of Yuntianhua International Composites: There are two aspects of core competitiveness, one is focus, and the second may be innovation. We have focused on the field of glass fiber composite materials for the past 30 years. We have continuously broken through the technical bottlenecks of the entire industry and led the technological development trend of the entire industry. Whether it is the design of glass formula or sizing agent formula, including leak plate processing, and the large-scale design of our large kilns and large-scale equipment, including the latest automation transformation and digital transformation. In general, we should lead the development of the entire industry in terms of technology iteration and product upgrades.
International Composites, founded in 1991, is a joint venture controlled by China and invested by the United States and Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of its establishment, it embraced the overseas market with the help of the technology and market advantages of the joint venture. Since 2011, International Composites has successively established overseas factories in Brazil, Bahrain and Morocco to cope with international trade barriers and get close to the market demand in South America, the Middle East, the United States and Europe.
Wei Zecong: After 2008, the US financial crisis. At that time, the entire US real estate market also declined sharply. For the first time, domestic overcapacity appeared. At that time, Europe began to carry out anti-dumping against China. We set three strategies at that time: internationalization, differentiation, and integration. Under the general environment, the market forced us to make the choice of going abroad and build production bases abroad.
Liao Yangyi: What experience can we get from pursuing dreams overseas for so many years?
Wei Zecong: Internationalization to a certain extent is still localization. If you can hire a local team to manage local enterprises or local teams, relatively speaking, the cost of the entire replication should be much lower. On the other hand, it is still the timely identification and follow-up of market demand. Especially in recent years, tariff policies or the expansion of application scenarios are also changing. As an overseas production base, we do marketing or sales overseas, and we must identify customer needs in a timely and accurate manner. Now, the customer demand side is developing in both directions: one is to develop towards high-end, special requirements, such as thermoplastic products, global major customers have put forward some new requirements for corrosion resistance and flame retardancy. The application scenarios are also constantly expanding. For consumer-level products, such as sports equipment, foreign application scenarios used to lead the domestic market, but now it is basically the other way around. These demands are from domestic to foreign, including the lightweight of new energy vehicles and the large-scale wind turbine blades, which are all pushed by China.
Keep up with the market and innovate continuously. In the past 30 years of opening up overseas markets, International Composites has achieved a transformation from gaining a foothold overseas to becoming an international leader, and has also witnessed new changes in the application scenarios of "Made in China" in the world. At present, Chongqing's materials industry, represented by International Composites, has become one of the industries with the most intensive technological innovation. In 2024, the output value of Chongqing's advanced materials industry will exceed 620 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15%.
Liao Yangyi: The global economic growth rate is slowing down. In such a large environment, the company's six major business growth paths are still rooted overseas. Is our current global layout complete? Where are the new growth points?
Wei Zecong: It should be said that it is still being optimized. After the outbreak, the entire supply chain has also undergone some changes, especially in Europe and the United States, there is a trend of localization and regionalization. So we are also thinking about re-evaluating our strategy. The next step is to find a way to make some of China's management standardization or advanced things better cover these two production bases.