On November 27, 2023, Liberation Daily featured an article titled Established Central Enterprise Achieves Accelerated Growth in New Track, which discusses China Haisum's digital transformation journey to find the intersection between traditional advantages and emerging businesses.
Established Central Enterprise Achieves Accelerated Growth in New Track
In a random store, the shelves filled with various light industrial products can be overwhelming. However, on the other hand, the traditional light industry market tends to be saturated, creating a crisis for many light manufacturing companies and even those providing design engineering services for them.
In the face of this crisis, China Haisum, a leading company in the light industry engineering design sector for 70 years, should have been the most vulnerable, but it has maintained stable "reverse growth". It has not only achieved profit growth exceeding revenue growth for consecutive years, but also transformed itself into a versatile company in new fields such as lithium-ion new materials, theme parks, energy conservation and environmental protection, and biomedicine.
Exploring New Application Scenarios for Traditional Businesses
"We rely on two tracks: 'traditional industry + emerging industry' in order to navigate through industry cycles," said Zhao Guoang, Party Secretary and Chairman of China Haisum. "Building a foundation with traditional businesses and then expanding the second curve" is the key to achieving high-quality accelerated growth.
High-quality accelerated growth is, of course, the key to enterprise transformation. However, it is not something that can be achieved just by chanting a slogan. It is crucial to find the right breakthrough point.
The popular Transformers Zone in Universal Beijing Resort is designed by China Haisum's team. This represents a significant cross-industry leap, as the company used to design operational assembly lines in factories and workshops.
China's construction industry opened up early, and domestic and foreign design institutions competed fiercely on the same platform. China Haisum's confidence in engaging in this field is precisely the advantage recognized by the capital side of Universal Beijing Resort - engineers' profound understanding of the operation and construction of process production lines in industrial projects, which civilian architectural design companies lack.
The Transformers Zone features a Decepticon roller coaster, which can accelerate to 100 kilometers per hour in just 4.5 seconds. Behind this lies the involvement of numerous complex specialties such as amusement craft, equipment control, structural crack, settling, and fire protection design.
"This is in line with the underlying logic of our factory and production line design", said Zhou Yuan, Vice President and Technical Director of China Haisum. The roller coaster is like an assembly line, and the supporting facilities are like the factory buildings.
Finding the intersection between traditional advantages and emerging businesses is the breakthrough point for China Haisum to explore new tracks and seek the second curve.
China Haisum has designed factories and production lines for many well-known liquor companies. The fermentation and purification processes related to them can also be applied to rapidly developing scenes such as synthetic biology and medical cosmetology product manufacturing. This can leverage its strong engineering design and system integration capabilities, and promote products from pilot testing to large-scale production.
Another example is the design of inorganic salt evaporation and crystallization processes, which is Haisum's traditional business that has been developed over several generations and has recently faced a saturated market. However, the booming lithium-ion industry has become the "rising tide" for this traditional business.
Basic lithium salts such as lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide needed for lithium-ion batteries coincide with the inorganic salt evaporation and crystallization process. "By leveraging our advantages in salt chemistry, we have gradually expanded our engineering business in the lithium battery industry, and undertaken multiple design and EPC projects in the production and recycling of lithium battery materials, continuously expanding our engineering project layout", said Wan Hua, Vice General Manager of China Haisum CEC. According to predictions, emerging industries represented by lithium battery alone will bring in more than 20% of the company's revenue this year.
Throughout the world, there are numerous legendary companies that have turned crises into opportunities by exploring second curves. For example, Intel, the inventor of memory storage, withdrew from the memory storage business and shifted its focus to the CPU field when faced competition from Japanese rivals and showed signs of decline, once again ranking at the forefront of the industry.
In the process of exploring the second curve, China Haisum has discovered the value of digital technology. With the help of digital technology, its design capabilities have undergone revolutionary breakthroughs. Pan Zhixiang, head of EIM Center, said, "Based on the experience and capabilities accumulated in high-standard foreign-related projects such as Universal Beijing Resort, we have empowered our three-dimensional design capabilities through digital platforms. Digital design can increase the model depth while reducing the design cycle for certain specialized design work, resulting in an average decrease of 5 to 10 design defects per unit."
Digital Transformation Becomes the New Driving Force
The mechanical arm swings up and down, high-temperature pasteurized milk is filled bag by bag, the conveyor belt moves rapidly forward... In Inner Mongolia's Yili Modern Smart Health Valley, there is a special liquid ecological milk factory with a daily production capacity of 3,500 tons, making it one of the largest single-room liquid milk production factories in the world.
The increase in production capacity implies the "upgrading" of production processes and upstream and downstream equipment. Cheng Jie, Vice General Manager of China Haisum CLWD, stated that after introducing high-capacity pre-pasteurization, E3 high-speed filling lines, KUKA mechanical arms, high-altitude conveying chains, unmanned cars, etc., the whole process of ambient temperature milk production has been connected efficiently, and the filling speed can reach 40,000 bags per hour.
The dairy fermentation industry is Haisum's traditional advantageous sector. With the help of digital technology, the traditional industry (known as the first curve) is moving towards high-end development. Although the traditional light industry is saturated, it still maintains its internal driving force. As unmanned, high-efficiency, and low-carbon trends become the new direction, new opportunities continue to emerge. Ultimately, these trends are all aimed at improving efficiency, reducing costs, and minimizing energy consumption.
Those who can seize opportunities are naturally those who are prepared. In recent years, China Haisum has explored the first curve, integrated digital concepts and tools into various applications, provided reliable information technology, intelligent system design, and operation and maintenance services, and created high-quality services and innovative products.
With the help of new technologies, new processes, and new integration methods, engineers have received many new orders for the transformation and upgrading of traditional factories. In recent years, the amount of new contracts signed for traditional businesses has maintained a growing trend. Last year, China Haisum achieved remarkable results, with a new contract amount of RMB 9.923 billion, reaching a historical high. In the first half of this year, the operating income, net profit, and new contract amount achieved positive growth, with operating income growing by 9.23% year-on-year.
Nowadays, under the background of the renewal of many traditional factory assembly lines, and under the background of the strengthening, complementing and connecting of numerous light industry chains, China Haisum has become an important power