Bearing group with German technology remains driving force

A huge bearing plant owned by ZWZ Group (also known as Wafangdian Bearing Group Corp) is now working at full tilt and is expected to continue at that pace until 2018, according to company officials.

"Lower-end products lack competitiveness," said Cong Hong, the chairman of the group. "But we are aiming at high-end products, and a global market."

ZWZ acquired German-based KRW Leipzig GmbH in 2013, a firm founded in 1904 which owned global leading technologies and its products are now widely used in railway vehicles, machinery manufacturing and new-energy fields.

The Chinese firm has became a key supplier to Siemens AG, the German multinational industrial conglomerate.

ZWZ is China's biggest bearing manufacturer and has become one of the world's top 3 manufacturing bases of wind power bearings. It increased its exports by 61 percent during the first five months of last year.

But more significantly, ZWZ's takeover of KRW Leipzig upgraded its technological development and service capability to handle more demanding overseas clients, said Cong.

ZWZ also started a research and development center in Detroit in the United States at the end of 2014, which he says now gives it the ability to meet "the strictest global technical standards and localized technical services for clients for the first time", and challenge for new work, most crucially with some of the US automobile firms.

ZWZ had a 7 billion yuan ($1.08 billion) annual revenue and now employs 11,000 staff.

It has supplied some of China's most high-profile projects, including the astronomical telescope near the South Pole.

"For various reasons, some specialized bearings cannot be imported, so as the country's leading producer we have a responsibility to make them," said Cong, who said the firm now manufactures nearly 3,000 types of bearings.

Established in Wafangdian in Dalian, in Northeast China's Liaoning province in 1938, ZWZ is very much the cradle of the country's bearing industry－the center of historical production that now extends to Harbin in Heilongjiang province, Luoyang in Henan province, and Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

The company claims to have provided support and assistance to more than 100 bearings companies in the form of staff, technology, and management.