In the Tianwei Instrument production workshop, workers are inspecting products.
◤A transnational blueprint officially opened this local enterprise's journey to overseas markets. From customized traditional flow meters to the widespread application of intelligent flow sensors, Anhui Tianwei Instrument Co., Ltd. has bravely sailed into the vast blue ocean of the international market, leaving footprints of "Made in China" in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, showcasing the style and strength of Hefei enterprises on the international stage.
Tianwei Instrument's journey to overseas markets is a vivid portrayal of Hefei enterprises going global, indicating that Hefei's high-end equipment manufacturing industry is moving towards a higher level of international cooperation and development.◢
Opening the "Overseas Journey" of Flow Meters
Entering the Tianwei Instrument production workshop located in Luyang Industrial Park, various types of automated production equipment are operating in an orderly manner, and the completed flow meters are neatly stacked aside, ready to be exported to Southeast Asia.
As a veteran employee of the company for 15 years, Zhou Wenwen, the marketing manager, still remembers the first foreign trade order vividly.
“In 2013, we joined Alibaba's International Station, and a person from Syria named Hary was looking for a professional oil meter supplier and happened to see our company,” Zhou Wenwen said. When they received the message from the other party, they were very surprised, “He listed the detailed parameters of the required instruments one by one, including the installation location on site.”
After two emails, Hary highly recognized the company's professionalism and came to Hefei as scheduled after a while.
Because it was the first export order, the whole company attached great importance to it and provided training to the staff from the workshop to the office. “As soon as we met, we took him to visit the factory. During the professional communication, we found that many technologies were indeed different, but he highly recognized the company's scale and directly gave me a very large blueprint.”
This blueprint clearly expresses the customer's personalized needs for the boiler, including a built-in temperature sensor and a layer of heating material like copper wire inside the instrument. The factory needs to manufacture it according to the blueprint and deliver it regularly.
For Tianwei Instrument, which has strong technical capabilities, producing personalized oil meters according to the customer's requirements is not difficult. As a "newbie in foreign trade", the difficulty lies in signing export contracts. "At that time, I didn't know much about most-favored-nation treatment, certificates of origin, etc., so I kept exploring and sought help from the Hefei Municipal Bureau of Commerce." After many hardships, this order totaling more than 400,000 yuan was successfully completed.
After manufacturing, the next step is transportation, which is also a major difficulty in exporting industrial equipment.
“We transported the produced flow meters to the Middle East. Because the instruments are very heavy, the air freight is quite high.” A month later, Hary came to Hefei again because the supporting instruments needed valves. “Later, due to the war in their country, out of humanitarianism, we customized these valves according to the drawings and gave them as a gift.”
The company's sincerity and strong technology moved the customer, and this order also became the starting point for Tianwei Instrument's overseas expansion.
A "Transnational Cooperation" Lasting Nearly Ten Years
Established in 2007, Tianwei Instrument is a professional flow meter manufacturing enterprise integrating R&D, production, sales, and service. Its products cover rotary vane flow meters, ultrasonic water meters, turbine flow meters, etc., of various materials and Applications, widely used in the petroleum, chemical, power transportation, food and pharmaceutical industries for trade settlement and measurement.
To this day, products have been exported to Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Speaking of the biggest difficulty in exporting, Wu Lili, the general manager's assistant, said, "Our products have specific characteristics, and the biggest difficulty is how to find customers that match us. This is true not only for foreign trade but also for domestic trade." Wu Lili told reporters that many infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia use Tianwei Instrument's products, and that is currently the company's main overseas market.
How to find suitable customers? Wu Lili said that in addition to using major foreign trade platform websites, the most important way is "old bringing new".
“Through years of accumulation, our Brand, reputation, and technology have developed overseas. Because flow meters are highly professional, many customers will come directly,” Wu Lili said. Solid product technology and good service support are the confidence for going overseas. "If they recognize you, they will continue to cooperate. A customer from India has been cooperating for nearly 10 years, with strong stickiness, and will also help us recommend products and the Brand.”
From a start-up company to an industry leader, from only serving the domestic market to gaining a foothold overseas, behind the growth of Tianwei Instrument is the continuous efforts of industrial technological transformation.
According to reports, the company has successively invested in the construction of modern standardized factories and introduced advanced production equipment such as CNC machining equipment and digital testing instruments, significantly improving production efficiency and product quality. Kong Qingsheng, general manager of the company, took the gas detection center's testing facilities as an example: "This equipment uses a 'sonic nozzle' gas detection device, which provides more professional test data for the company's mass flow meters, velocity flow meters, and volume flow meters."
Reporters learned that for the flow measurement industry, the production processes in China and abroad are the same, the only difference being the different production standards in different countries. "We will formulate different standards such as European standards, Japanese standards, and German standards, which will not affect the core components." Wu Lili said that technological innovation is the core competitiveness of enterprises and has laid a solid foundation for the company's export to overseas markets.
Aspiring to Do More Domestic Substitution
With the arrival of the dual-carbon era, high-energy-consuming industries are forced to adjust their energy and industrial structures, and energy control, energy conservation and emission reduction, and intelligent manufacturing have become new market demands, which has given Tianwei Instrument a broad market prospect.
“Our flow meters can measure and control various gases in steel, cement, thermal power, new energy vehicles, and new energy chemicals, thereby accelerating the research and development of cutting-edge technologies such as low-carbon emissions, improving the comprehensive utilization and recycling of resources and energy, and improving the actual effect of energy conservation and emission reduction.”
Starting from a blueprint to developing products with independent intellectual property rights, Tianwei Instrument has now grown into a national high-tech enterprise in the field of intelligent flow metering, and the Tianwei Instrument Brand has successfully entered the domestic and international high-end markets.
General Manager Kong Qingsheng told reporters that behind this is the company's consistent adherence to independent innovation and the development of the real economy. It not only integrates the scientific research strength of domestic first-tier universities such as the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei University of Technology, and Guangdong University of Technology, owns more than 20 core patents and software copyrights, but also has successively passed international quality management system, occupational health management system, and environmental system certifications. In 2019, the company was awarded the title of "Specialized, Refined, Unique, and New" small and medium-sized enterprise in Anhui Province.
In recent years, through continuous investment in research and development, the company's technological level in manufacturing rotary flow meters and other areas has reached the leading position in the industry, breaking the long-term monopoly of overseas companies and becoming a domestic substitute for international first-tier brands. Kong Qingsheng said, "In the future, we hope to replace more leading foreign products."
"We will continue to accelerate the construction of the Internet of Things platform system, deepen the integration and application of mobile Internet of Things in manufacturing, energy, water, chemical industry, and transportation sectors, push China's high-end manufacturing to the forefront of the international market, and strive to build an international high-end intelligent flow instrument production base."
Tianwei Instruments is a microcosm of the development of Hefei's high-end equipment manufacturing industry. Today, this industry has become Hefei's second industrial cluster with a scale exceeding 100 billion yuan, and is currently in a critical period of development and expansion.
In the future, Hefei will also build more technology supply and demand, display and trading platforms for the equipment manufacturing industry, promote the promotion and application of major first-of-its-kind technological equipment, accelerate the stimulation of new productivity, and propel the high-end equipment manufacturing industry into the "fast lane" of innovative development.
Hefei Tong Client - Hefei All-Media Reporter
Li Runyuan/Text Wang Hao/Photo Intern Amy
