A Chinese special steel maker in Jiangsu Province has been consistently profitable over the past three decades despite industry ups and downs.
China is the world's largest steel producing country with an annual production exceeding one trillion tons. It produces more than half of the world's total crude steel.
China's steel industry has been grappling with weak domestic demand and uncertainty in world trade for year. In 2024, industry profits as a whole suffered with an over 50 percent decline, but there are still a few enterprises that managed to weather the difficulty.
In the case with Jiangsu's CITIC Pacific Special Steel, business sustainability lies in continuous self-improvement.
Today the company leads the industry in green production. Stepping into its industrial park, one could hardly tell if the production was under way by looking at the chimneys. Only two or three chimneys are emitting vapor in the entire park.
The Pacific Special Steel has been significantly cutting carbon emissions since the 1990s. The company established a small zoo inside its industrial park, which has been a trend among Chinese steelmakers to show that the environment is excellent. However, it went further to host black swans in a lake filled with treated industrial wastewater, for the water must be very clean to keep these delicate geese healthy.
Special steel is widely used in fields such as automotive, high speed rail, aerospace machinery and shipbuilding that requires high quality steel. Producing special steel is so demanding in technology that only a few Chinese makers are competitive globally.
Pacific Special Steel's chief engineer Xu Xiaohong has devoted his entire life to raise product quality. When other steelmakers are pulling all stops to cut product costs, Xu realized their future lies in the added value of high-quality products. He began to lead the team on a journey to becoming the record breaker in the industry.
"Back in the 1990s, we started to go global. Exports were small. So I focused on product application and client demands. I feel grateful to our clients. They made us understand that it is not enough only to meet the standards of production," Xu said.
To facilitate China's green transformation, Xu's team managed to make the world's smallest steel wire, finer than human hair, for cutting monocrystalline silicon bars into thin slices and making them into Solar panels, and the world's largest steel round bloom, over 1.3 meters in diameter - a material essential for making wind turbines.
Offshore wind turbines are much bigger than those on land and the steel used to make them also has to be big. In 2007, the diameter of the largest round bloom was only 370 millimeters. Xu decided to make them bigger. Two years ago the world's largest continuously cast round bloom was born in Pacific Special Steel's factory with a diameter of 1,320 millimeters, and the quality of the steel ensures that the turbines operate for 20 years without requiring maintenance.
Xu doesn't think too much of the global trade environment. Instead, he believes in meeting clients' demands by raising product quality. Like the chief engineer, young people at Pacific Special Steel are also determined about the direction.
Smart production helped the company win the title of lighthouse factory in the World Economic Forum's global selection in 2023 - the first one in special steel industry worldwide.
Today in the company's blast furnace plants, most of a furnaceman's work, is done in front of screens, only a few need to stay in the plant.
"We have a cooling system for our workers inside the blast furnace plant. Though some of us still need to work in front of the furnaces, the operation is automatic. A remote control helps them finish most of the work. Also, we now have many robots. In the past, our workers had to carry respirators for blast furnace inspections. Now, robots are doing it for us," said Wang Yuxin, deputy director of the iron making plant.
In the past few decades amid the boom in the housing market, prices of ordinary steel, mainly construction steel, were once high. It was a good chance to make easy money, but Pacific Special Steel chose to focus on its own business.
"Strategic focus is one of our most important factors. There was a time when construction steel is lucrative, but we didn't change our focus. We stick to the manufacturing of special steel and we paid to learn. We spent nearly 10 million U.S. dollars to cooperate and learn from Voestalpine to increase the quality of our bearing steel. Later, our cooperation in exchanges with Japanese companies also brought the quality of our automotive steel to a new level," said Jiang Qiao, general manager of the company's sales department.
Chinese special steel maker thrives through industry up and downs
