Qilu Evening News·Qilu One Point Reporter Cai Yudan
In the most traditional industry sequence of “ferrous metal smelting and processing”, the products are closely linked to emerging industry tracks such as robots, rail transit, and wind power.
When the industry is deeply trapped in the internal circulation, Huxi Casting Industry, this private Shandong casting company is opening up a new narrative in the breakthrough of globalization.
95% of customers are the Fortune 500 equipment manufacturing companies such as Caterpillar, ZF, Derner, and Volvo; revenue in 2024 was 680 million yuan, exports surged by 80% year-on-year, and the target in 2025 was 1.2 billion yuan, and exports are expected to exceed 650 million yuan.
Even in the eighteen counties, world-class precision manufacturing can be nurtured.
When peers are deeply involved in the intra-conversion process, how can this top 100 foundry company in China located in Dan County become an “irreplaceable” among global machinery giants?
1. PK with Indian and Korean manufacturers: Can you “do it right at once”?
In February 2025, the United States imposed a 10% tariff on imported Chinese products, which had been transmitted to products exported to the United States by Huxi Casting. However, Zhu Lin, deputy general manager and director of investor relations, was relieved.
It turned out that American customers not only continued to use Chinese products whose costs had increased by 10%, but also sent them new product orders. This new order gave Zhu Lin a reassurance.
Looking around the world, Huxi Casting now has another India in addition to Korean, European and American manufacturers.
Since India's casting production surpassed the United States in 2015, India has become the world's second largest casting producer since China. A few years ago, Huxi Casting’s products sold to the United States had been subject to a 25% tariff. For this globalized company in the United States, three years is enough for them to replace new suppliers, but they sent a batch of new orders to Huxi Casting.
In 2023 and 2024, Huxi Casting Industry won the world's outstanding supplier of Caterpillar in the United States for two consecutive years, achieving a delivery rate of 0 defective products per million pieces and a 100% delivery rate of 12 consecutive months. In 2024, Huxi Casting Industry passed Volvo Casting Review at one time, and after two and a half years of review by Volkswagen's commercial vehicle brand and global commercial vehicle giant Scania, it officially entered the Volkswagen supply system.
What ability does Huxi Casting have to remain firmly on the list of core suppliers of global machinery giants under the pressure of tariffs?
In September 2022, Huxiwang Group posted an article on its WeChat official account, revealing the secrets of how to successfully deliver 6 new Caterpillar products in one go within 3 months in the first half of 2022.
There are more than 800 product acceptance standards for these 6 new products from Caterpillar, involving more than 20 processes.
Unlike other customers, in Caterpillar's sample development, each process needs to be verified and can only be transferred to the next process after obtaining Caterpillar approval, which adds great difficulty to the supplier's delivery cycle. To complete the delivery of multiple samples of 6 products within 3 months, it must be successfully developed at one time and ensure that each process must be successfully developed at one time.
This article shows many details about completing this “test paper” of Caterpillar –
“Product development generally requires five stages: product review, tool tool tool design, process development design, sample debugging, and delivery. For material, design, process, production, and quality, the team members are extremely strict with each link, and want to complete the same height of the 'ceiling' at each stage.”
This also means that Indian and Korean suppliers must compete with Huxi Casting and also have the ability to “do it right at once”.
Behind being “stamped and certified” by global giants, Huxi Casting's products supplying Caterpillar achieved 0 defective products in 2024, and ZF's PPM (defective products per million pieces) dropped to 0 for 12 consecutive months in 2023; the average equipment failure rate in 2023 decreased by 54%, and the equipment failure rate in 2024 decreased by 58% on the basis of 2023.
Since 2013, Huxi Casting has cooperated with Caterpillar. Even with the increase in tariffs and the cost increases, Caterpillar is unwilling to abandon China's supply chain, because looking around the world, suppliers like Huxi Casting are also a scarce resource.
Within the time specified by the customer, we must turn the new product concept into a reality customized development capability, and the supply chain must have strong engineering innovation capabilities. Mold development, casting, machining, and coating processes must keep up with the pace and innovate quickly. Every year, large customers like Apple continue to eliminate suppliers because of this R&D and manufacturing capability around the world, there are not many suppliers that can keep up with the innovation pace of host manufacturers and brand manufacturers.
From the perspective of the global supply chain system, this cooperation model that cooperates with R&D, joint process development, and test development has enabled a solid industrial chain and supply chain relationship between large customers and the supply chain. For example, “Fruit Chain” represents the company Goertek Acoustics, which is constantly evolving itself through close cooperation with large customers such as Apple, Samsung, and Google.
2. Become the “2%” at the top of the pyramid
The exhibition hall of Huxi King Group contains various castings developed and manufactured by Huxi Casting for major customers around the world in the 16 years from 2006 to 2022.
In 2006, Huxi Casting Industry was a commercial vehicle wheel hub manufactured by Qingte Group. Now this entry-level product in the casting industry has gradually withdrawn from Huxi King's supply list, but a large number of foundry manufacturers still produce it in batches.
In 2022, the ADI precision-guided teeth steering joint developed and manufactured by Huxi Casting for European customers has now become a star product of Huxi Casting.
ADI (isothermal quenched ductile iron) is a high-performance engineering material, known as a “black gold mine” for heavy machinery to achieve lightweight. It can realize a long-standing dream in the casting industry: to increase the tensile strength of cast iron to be like steel, and at the same time have excellent ductility. This new green engineering material is particularly suitable for manufacturing key components of high-end equipment and is used in lightweight innovation, and the cost is about 20% lower than forged steel and cast steel. After the car crankshaft uses ADI materials, the fatigue strength and wear resistance are significantly improved, and the weight is reduced by about 10%, which greatly reduces manufacturing costs. ADI products have also begun to be widely used in high-load and high-wear resistance parts such as reducers, hydraulic valve blocks, and robot joints.
Under the wave of lightweighting, this major material innovation will undoubtedly trigger a series of changes in the industrial chain.
In 2016, Huxiwang Group began to develop ADI products, and in 2018, it jointly developed the first batch of ADI products with its top four customers in the world.
In July 2022, Huxiwang Group cooperated with new Italian customers to develop 80 new ADI products at one time for floating steering knuckles and brackets for buses in just 40 days. The material properties, mechanical properties and strength of this new product are more than 1.5 times that of ordinary cast iron, and the elongation is 3 times that of ordinary cast iron. Compared with other similar castings, the product weight is reduced by 10-35%, and the cost is reduced by about 15%-40%.
A report from the 2020 China Foundry Association shows that the domestic ADI product share is less than 2%, which means that Huxi Casting is ahead of 98% of the country's foundry companies.
The development of ADI products is of milestone significance for Huxi Casting Industry. Under the wave of lightweighting, Huxi Casting has entered new fields such as rail transit, wind power, and robots, once again broadening its boundaries.
Since 2021, Huxi Casting Industry has made every effort to break through key technical bottlenecks such as cast alloyed high-strength tough ductile iron. Compared with ordinary ductile iron, these new materials have higher tensile strength and yield strength, and also have performance advantages such as wear resistance, impact resistance, shock absorption, etc., which can reduce weight by more than 20%, increase safety factor by more than 25%, and increase fuel efficiency by more than 8%, realizing casting instead of forging and casting instead of assembly, better meet the lightweight needs of automobiles, and have low overall costs.
Huxi Casting Industry revealed that according to order information, sales of this material product are expected to grow by more than 35% in 2025.
3. Survivor Game: Never Walk the Old Road
The 2020 industry report of the China Foundry Association shows that there were about 26,881 foundry companies in China in 2020, a decrease of more than 10,000 from 2016, a decrease of more than 35%. Among these foundry manufacturers, there are about 1,000 manufacturers with a production capacity of more than 10,000 tons, and less than 200 manufacturers with a production capacity of more than 50,000 tons.
This data shows the two-level differentiation trend of the casting industry. As the casting industry accelerates the elimination of backward production capacity, from January to November 2024, the profit margin of enterprises in the national black forging industry dropped to 0.1%.
Qichacha data shows that on January 1, 2024, there were 17,729 ferrous metal casting enterprises in Shandong Province, and 17,638 on December 31, 2024 (Note: Only the in-service surviving enterprises in the national standard industry are “ferrous metal casting”).
In this survivor game, why can Huxi Casting become the one who survives and lives well?
In addition to a team composed of elite talents such as casting and machining, which can fight and bear and have super execution, the key lies in “continuously improving technical research and development level.” For example, the R&D team can further optimize performance and meet specific engineering requirements by adjusting the chemical composition and heat treatment process of ADI according to the specific application needs of customers.
In 2024, Huxi Casting Industry successfully developed more than 80 projects, with a growth rate of 197%. This means that this company has put aside the traditional old path of “large-scale and low-cost” and has taken on a new script “customized for customers”.
4. Form a “Dream Team” with sufficient bargaining ability
2022 is a critical year in the development history of Huxiwang Group.
This year, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the profit margin of the entire foundry industry fell by 97.64% year-on-year. In such a difficult situation in the industry, Huxi Casting has made a major choice to kick off a company that has been working for more than 15 years but has continued to lower prices on suppliers and has not paid in time.
Between the choices, what Huxi Casting Industry wants is sustainable development.
The knockout round in the foundry industry continues to intensify the industry's inversion, and host manufacturers keep reducing prices on suppliers. What is overdrawn is the supplier's survival ability, which inhibits innovation and R&D investment, which is not conducive to the sustainable development of the industrial chain.
The foundry industry's largest customers come from the automotive industry. Cui Dongshu, Secretary-General of the Joint Branch of Passenger Car Market Information of the China Automobile Dealers Association, recently revealed a set of data that in 2024, China's automobile industry's revenue was 10.65 trillion yuan, an increase of 4% year-on-year; profit was 462.3 billion yuan, an decrease of 8% year-on-year; and the profit margin of the automobile industry was 4.3%.
The automobile industry is constantly price wars, and there are many “scroll kings”. The industrial chain faces a soul question: Is the price of the scroll valuable?
To challenge intra-volume, you must have sufficient bargaining power to stand at the top of the pyramid. This channel is intelligent manufacturing.
In 2022, Huxiwang Group did not issue year-end bonuses. This year, Chairman Zhu Qijun made a decision to invest 560 million yuan to build an intelligent center, cooperate with smart factories, monitor the production process in real time, accurately grasp production data, use algorithms to optimize production processes, and reduce costs and various risks.
In this newly formed digital manufacturing system, the German KW casting production line, the Japanese Mazak flexible production line + robot automatic production line, the MAGMA Magma casting simulation and analysis system, the Zeiss three-coordinate, the German Leica DMI8C metallographic instrument… gathers a global high-end equipment “Dream Team” in the casting industry.
To stand at the top of the pyramid, you must gnaw on the “hard bones”. The most important control points of casting are chemical composition and spheroidization rate; the difficulty of machining lies in three aspects: hardness, deformation and accuracy. This “Dream Team” composed of more than 90 high-end intelligent equipment is to specifically eat up these hard-to-kill hard bones.
In the wave of industrial upgrading, private enterprises urgently need to send “ammunition” to capital. In 2024, Huxi Casting introduced two strategic investors with state-owned assets backgrounds, and continued to increase investment in digital intelligence-
126 million yuan was invested to intelligently upgrade existing production equipment, and the CNC rate of key equipment after the update reached 94.8%; a MES intelligent management system was built, and the automatic production data collection rate reached more than 98%, and the equipment saved more than 25% of energy compared with existing equipment, and the efficiency was increased by more than 30%.
In January 2025, Zhu Qijun, chairman of Huxiwang Group, revealed at the 2025 Danxian Economic Work Conference that Huxi Casting is planning a project with a total investment of 1.5 billion yuan, of which 700 million yuan is invested in the renewal of green, intelligent high-end digital and intelligent industrial chains and high-standard coating projects.
5. There are great existences even when it is behind
In 2024, Huxi Casting Industry achieved annual sales revenue of 680 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15.36%. This year, Huxi casting exports increased by 80% compared with 2023.
Zhu Qijun revealed at the 2025 Danxian Economic Work Conference that in 2025, it is expected that Huxi Casting Industry's exports are expected to exceed 650 million yuan, sales revenue exceeds 1 billion yuan, and strive to exceed 1.2 billion yuan.
This data highlights the company's breakthrough in globalization. At the key point of global operation, Huxiwang Group has cultivated a group of professional talents familiar with international market rules.
In 2024, Zhu Lin, deputy general manager of Huxiwang Group, flew 172,299 kilometers and carried out global business in 12 countries including the United States and Europe.
Zhu Lin went to Singapore to study at the age of 14, and later joined the World's Top 500 DHL, and was shortlisted for the DHL Best Employee Representative of the Year for three consecutive years. As DHL's global account manager, Zhu Lin has been dealing with multinational giants such as Apple and Dell for a long time, and has been well aware of the rules of the game in the international market in a series of business negotiations. In 2023, under the rising price of energy and raw materials, after multiple rounds of negotiations, Zhu Lin successfully allowed international customers to accept the reasonable requirements for the price increase of parts proposed by Huxi Casting.
This is in sharp contrast to the way some domestic companies live to grab orders and roll them together.
In the Huxi Casting Industry Exhibition Hall, we saw a very shocking sentence-
No matter how small an individual is, he can create miracles; no matter how backward an individual is, there are great existences.
Zhu Lin said that every time European and American customers come to the factory, she always invites these big customers to go out of the workshop and contact front-line workers.
This deep contact has a huge impact on a county worker. They may not be able to leave the country for the rest of their lives and are devoted to the production line. However, in the face-to-face communication with the Fortune 500 companies, a sense of pride arises naturally—
My work is so valuable! The parts I produce and process are used in the products of a century-old company!
Employees' sense of gain is reflected in their salary. In 2023 and 2024, Huxi King Group will pay year-end bonuses for two consecutive years, and a technical master can get year-end bonuses of 50,000 to 100,000 yuan.
Even in the eighteen counties, world-class precision manufacturing can be nurtured.
While most companies are still trapped in the quagmire of winning by quantity, Huxi Casting has used the path it has taken to provide a vivid sample for the breakthrough of China's manufacturing.
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