Craftsmanship Forges Great Tools, Liming Shines Across the Globe — Mr. Huang Yizhong, Chairman of Xiamen Zheng Liming Metallurgical Machinery Co., Ltd., and His Life Dedicated to Cold Roll Forming
Foreword
Xiamen Zheng Liming Metallurgical Machinery Co., Ltd. (Xiamen Liming Machinery) was founded in 1989 in Xiamen, a coastal city with beautiful scenery and convenient transportation. The company covers an area of over 100,000 square meters. As a domestic professional manufacturer of complete sets of metal sheet cold rolling (roll forming) equipment, after nearly 40 years of continuous development, the company has successively won many honors such as “High-tech Enterprise”, “Fujian Famous Brand Product” and “Key Private Enterprise”. At present, its “LM” trademark has been registered in 88 countries, and its products are exported to more than 100 countries and regions in Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and Oceania, establishing a towering milestone in the field of cold roll forming equipment manufacturing. The leader, Huang Yizhong, a down-to-earth entrepreneur who transformed from a state-owned enterprise technician to an industry leader, is leading this dream-driven enterprise to steadily sail into a new journey full of opportunities and challenges with profound technical accumulation and forward-looking strategic vision.
In the early morning light of Xiamen (known as the “Egret Island”), sets of customized cold roll forming equipment for customers are ready to be shipped around the world. Behind these cold roll equipment lies a craftsman’s nearly 40-year persistence—Mr. Huang Yizhong, chairman of Xiamen Zheng Liming Metallurgical Machinery Co., Ltd. His life trajectory is just like a precision cold roll forming machine: focusing on rolling every inch of steel plate, only to achieve the sublimation of life.
From a state-owned enterprise employee to starting a business, Mr. Huang Yizhong took a milestone step in his life. Zheng Liming has gone from introducing, imitating, and learning to researching, innovating, and exporting; from a small private factory with a dozen people to a key private enterprise in Xiamen with a professional technical team of nearly 100 people and 300 employees. Mr. Huang Yizhong and the Xiamen Zheng Liming Metallurgical Machinery Co., Ltd. he leads have always adhered to craftsmanship, focusing on making “good cold roll machinery”.
### The Origin of Craftsmanship: From “Unintentional Effort” to a Firm Direction
Huang Yizhong’s entrepreneurial story is full of the interplay of era opportunities and personal persistence. In the 1980s, after graduating from school, Huang Yizhong joined a state-owned enterprise and became a steady and down-to-earth mechanical technician. He witnessed the rapid changes of Xiamen Special Economic Zone under the reform and opening-up wave, and saw many foreign manufacturers come to Xiamen to invest and build factories. When advanced international construction technologies poured in, especially when he saw that foreign enterprises used a lot of imported color formed steel plates and their manufacturing equipment for factory construction while the domestic market was still blank, a friend approached him. “At that time, there were no such equipment and raw materials in China at all; we were completely dependent on imports, and the cost was very high,” Huang Yizhong recalled. A friend with good business sense saw the huge business opportunity and invited Huang Yizhong, who was proficient in machinery, to tackle the problem together. With a strong sense of mission and the persistence of a technician, he and his friend went north to visit top experts at the China Metallurgical Construction Design Institute to gain valuable knowledge, and then went south to study and inspect the workshops of Shanghai Baosteel. After witnessing the first cold roll forming equipment imported from abroad, Huang Yizhong began to develop his own cold roll forming equipment—equipment that belonged to China.
Success did not come easily. From the first drawing made by technicians to the birth of the first domestic cold roll forming equipment, they went through countless failures. Huang Yizhong still clearly remembers the scene where colored plate raw materials multiplied in value instantly after rolling and the crazy rush for formed colored plates in the market after the equipment trial production succeeded. What’s more unexpected was that customers who originally bought colored plates turned to purchase equipment one after another. The huge market gap spawned new business opportunities. Huang Yizhong vaguely saw a broad market prospect, and at his friend’s repeated invitation, he resolutely gave up his “iron rice bowl” (stable job). As the saying goes, “what starts as an accident ends in success”—Xiamen Liming Machinery was thus born. In the beginning, Liming Machinery was in the exploration stage of “following, imitating, and secondary innovation”. On the basis of fully absorbing foreign new technologies and processes, the first YX76-344-688 floor bearing plate roll forming machine came out, filling the domestic gap.
Liming Machinery grew from small to large and from weak to strong, going through an extremely arduous exploration path, which can be called a model for Chinese metallurgical machinery equipment to enter domestic and foreign markets. Since its establishment in 1989, Huang Yizhong has devoted all his energy to the R&D and manufacturing of cold roll forming equipment. From product R&D to enterprise management, from marketing to customer service, Huang Yizhong took care of every detail personally. As the enterprise continued to expand and needed standardized development, the company moved for the first time in the mid-1990s, relocating from Zengcuo’an in Xiamen Island to the larger Xinglin Industrial Zone. Due to regional administrative management needs, the company newly established “Xiamen Zheng Liming Metallurgical Machinery Co., Ltd.” (hereinafter referred to as “Zheng Liming”). The establishment of Zheng Liming symbolized the company’s transition from struggling in the start-up period to a high-speed development path as a technology-driven, leading cold roll equipment brand in China.
Then in 2008, to support the enterprise’s longer-term and more ambitious development goals and build a modern industrial base integrating R&D, manufacturing, and display, Zheng Liming carried out its second strategic relocation, moving from Xinglin Industrial Zone to the current Tong’an new factory area with first-class facilities covering over 100,000 square meters. After this relocation, Zheng Liming established a more complete and advanced modern processing and production center. Over the past decade, relying on the hardware advantages and technical accumulation of the Tong’an new factory, the company has successfully broken through many key technical bottlenecks in the industry and continuously developed high-end equipment with independent intellectual property rights, just like a dragon entering the sea, opening up a broader world.
“People’s energy is limited; it’s enough to really do one thing well in a lifetime. Only by focusing wholeheartedly and persisting can we do better, more carefully, and more precisely in the professional field!” Huang Yizhong’s motto has long been internalized into the code of conduct for every Liming employee. In quality control, he is almost harsh and maintains consistent requirements; in technological innovation, he encourages exploration and bravely embraces changes. He believes that as a high-tech enterprise, it should attach importance to innovative R&D and build an innovation model with technology as the core. Therefore, the 100-person R&D team can well ensure breakthroughs in more key core technologies to meet the needs of different customers. Under his leadership, Zheng Liming has built a development model driven by technological innovation. This R&D team composed of nearly 100 elites is a powerful engine for Zheng Liming to overcome difficulties and continuously meet the diversified and personalized needs of global customers.
### Focused Cultivation: Craftsmanship Builds “Liming’s Good Machinery”
All along, Zheng Liming has always adhered to craftsmanship manufacturing, customer orientation, and taken customers’ personalized customization needs as the main direction of product R&D. In 2004, Zheng Liming undertook a business from a Shanghai customer to customize a cold roll forming machine. This equipment had a special plate shape, high precision requirements, and great processing difficulty. The customer had visited many machinery enterprises, but was rejected due to the high difficulty and lack of market benefits. The customer came to Zheng Liming without much hope, but adhering to the principle of addressing customers’ urgent needs, Huang Yizhong decided to take over the business and successfully developed the equipment, which was highly praised by the customer. Although there was no profit in this development process, Zheng Liming won the customer’s recognition with sincerity and strength. Such examples of “daring to face difficulties despite knowing the challenges” are numerous in Zheng Liming’s growth history.
Looking back to the end of the last century, when participating in the construction of super high-rise buildings like Shanghai Jinmao Tower, high-rise open floor bearing plate equipment was completely monopolized by a foreign giant, and its high price made domestic construction companies such as Shanghai Baoye and Shanghai General Steel Structure hesitate. Xiamen Zheng Liming Machinery rose to the challenge, successfully independently developed and delivered high-rise open floor bearing plate forming equipment that met the requirements. This not only saved customers huge costs, ensured the smooth progress of the project, and won industry praise, but also broke the monopoly of foreign enterprises, completely pushing them out of the Chinese market, achieving a major breakthrough in domestic high-end cold roll equipment, and writing a proud chapter for national industry.
In 2005, the construction of the landmark new CCTV headquarters began. As a key supplier of closed floor bearing plates, enterprises such as Beijing Duowei United Group faced huge challenges of high standards and strict requirements. Zheng Liming Machinery was entrusted with the task in critical times. With profound technical accumulation and efficient execution, it successfully delivered high-quality floor bearing plate forming equipment within the specified time. This equipment not only perfectly met the strict requirements of the CCTV project for precision and strength, but also guaranteed the construction progress with its stable performance, becoming the “invisible backbone” supporting this landmark building, fully demonstrating Zheng Liming’s technical strength and contractual spirit.
The first phase of Shanghai Pudong International Airport project kicked off. As one of China’s three major international gateway hubs, the metal roof enclosure system of its first-phase project, from aluminum-magnesium-manganese alloy plates to key forming equipment, all relied on imports from a famous foreign steel mill. Baosteel Color Steel Building New Technology Company was determined to realize material localization. After arduous efforts, it successfully replaced imported aluminum-magnesium-manganese plates with high-performance domestic color plates, won the supply right for the expansion project, and pushed foreign material suppliers out of the project. However, material localization was only the first step; how to realize the localization of complex curved roof panel forming equipment became a greater challenge. The terminal corridor is 1,440 meters long, and its metal roof design is extremely complex, including standard sections with cosine curves, transition sections, and end enlarged sections. This requires the forming equipment to be able to smoothly complete multi-directional and multi-section arc bending forming of the whole plate at one time, ensuring precise control of different arc radii and consistent height of all inflection points.
Facing this key national image project and unprecedented technical difficulties, Zheng Liming was entrusted with the task. Huang Yizhong took personal charge and quickly assembled top elites in the company’s roll forming design, hydraulic and pneumatic, non-standard equipment, electrical automation and other fields. With a strong sense of mission to win glory for the country and realize the localization of high-end equipment, the R&D team worked day and night and made bold innovations, successfully integrating the cold roll forming main machine with a unique positive and negative curved surface mechanism, and developed the “YX51-360 color plate positive and negative curved surface roll forming unit” with completely independent intellectual property rights. This new equipment, reaching the international advanced level, perfectly solved the world-class problem of one-time forming of large-span complex curved surfaces, ensuring precise plate curvature and consistent inflection points, creating a smooth and beautiful giant “steel wing” for the first phase of Pudong Airport project. The successful application of this unit not only brought a perfect localization conclusion to this century project, but also its excellent performance and engineering contribution helped the whole project win the sixth batch of “China Construction Steel Structure Gold Award”, one of China’s highest honors for construction engineering quality. This is the highest recognition of Zheng Liming’s technical strength and a milestone for Chinese cold roll equipment to achieve independent breakthroughs and keep pace with the world in high-precision fields.
### Keeping Pace with the Times: Targeting Markets, Seizing Opportunities During the Epidemic
“Focus and professionalism are our original aspiration; keeping pace with the times and continuous evolution are the necessity for survival and development,” Huang Yizhong emphasized. In the context of rapidly changing technology, volatile markets, maturing industries, and continuous social changes, even traditional manufacturing industries like cold roll forming equipment must embrace changes and take the initiative to evolve. This keen market insight and rapid response capability were fully demonstrated during the severe test of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
When the epidemic forced many industries to press the “pause button” and numerous enterprises struggled, Zheng Liming, relying on profound industry accumulation and accurate grasp of market trends, quickly focused on a booming new field—modular construction. Huang Yizhong recalled: “In fact, Zheng Liming entered the modular construction field very early, at the industry’s embryonic stage. Although the product form and name were different from now, our role as equipment manufacturers was very clear: serving modular construction enterprises. We worked closely with these customers, discussed together, and continuously optimized various profile processing equipment needed for modular construction production, making them more reasonable, automated, and user-friendly. It can be said that modular construction enterprises are driving the market, and we are following up synchronously and continuously improving technical solutions.”
Xiamen Zheng Liming’s complete modular construction equipment solutions fully reflect its strong system integration and high-end equipment manufacturing capabilities. The whole system mainly covers skeleton equipment, plate equipment, and production equipment for supporting accessories and decorative parts, requiring more than 20 sets of precision equipment to complete the automated production process of a complete modular building. Among them, the modular building top beam automated production line independently developed and produced by Zheng Liming is a microcosm of its technical strength: it integrates material uncoiling, positioning, front shearing device, feeding and leveling, lubrication device, forming, punching device, and shearing into one complete process. Particularly critical is its advanced punching device, which includes a set of high-precision punching dies and head-to-tail notch punching combination dies, greatly improving production efficiency and processing accuracy, and achieving significant energy and cost savings.
It was this forward-looking layout and technical accumulation that enabled Zheng Liming to achieve explosive growth during the severe pandemic period. Modular construction, with its characteristics of rapid deployment, flexibility, and efficiency, was widely used in the emergency construction of anti-epidemic facilities such as mobile cabin hospitals, isolation wards, and nucleic acid testing stations, leading to a surge in market demand. Zheng Liming, with its mature, reliable, and highly automated complete modular construction equipment, quickly became a market favorite, with equipment in short supply. This not only helped Zheng Liming effectively withstand the impact of the epidemic, but also became a strong engine for it to turn crises into opportunities and achieve counter-trend growth, accurately seizing market opportunities and further expanding its territory and influence in the cold roll forming equipment field.
### Standards as the Foundation: Setting Industry Standards, Leading the Industry Future
Standing at the starting point of the new 30 years, Huang Yizhong has a clear blueprint for the future of Zheng Liming and the industry: “In the past 30 years, Zheng Liming has achieved excellence; in the next 30 years, our goal is to pursue brilliance and achieve the leap from excellence to brilliance.” He profoundly pointed out that the healthy development of the industry cannot do without norms and order. “Blindly following and vicious competition will only stifle innovation and hinder development. The prosperity of the industry requires every enterprise to have a good growth environment. ‘No rules, no standards’—and the most powerful weapon to standardize the industry is standards!”
“In the early years, when our equipment was exported, we were often asked: ‘What are your manufacturing standards? Which country’s standards do you follow?'” Huang Yizhong recalled. Behind this question is the international market’s scrutiny of the quality of Chinese-manufactured products and a threshold that Chinese high-end equipment must cross to “go global”. “At that time, there was a lack of unified and authoritative national standards in the domestic cold roll forming equipment manufacturing field, which became a pain point for us and the entire industry. Without standards, there is no authoritative basis for evaluating product quality, making it difficult for the international market to fully trust us.”
Faced with this dilemma, Huang Yizhong made a decisive decision: since there were no existing standards, we would set rules for ourselves and be industry pioneers. In 1997, Huang Yizhong took the lead in organizing personnel, with the support of Xiamen Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision, to formulate the first version of the enterprise standard “Metal Plate Roll Forming Machine”. This standard has undergone 3 major revisions, forming the 2004 version of the enterprise standard “Metal Plate Roll Cold Forming Complete Sets of Equipment”, which won the third prize of China Standard Innovation Contribution Award in 2008. This standard reached the domestic leading level and was in line with international standards. In the same year, Zheng Liming took the lead in drafting the Fujian local standard “Continuous Roll Cold Forming Machine”, which was released on March 11, 2009, and officially implemented on April 1. Approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Technical Committee for Standardization of Forging Machinery, Zheng Liming also took the lead in drafting industry standards and national standards such as “General Technical Conditions for Roll Cold Forming Machinery” and “General Technical Conditions for Crease Forming Plate Bending Machines”. On January 14, 2010, the National Technical Committee for Standardization of Forging Machinery agreed to establish the “Roll Cold Forming Equipment Working Group”, composed of 11 members, with Huang Yizhong as the leader. On April 1, 2018, the national standard GB/T34385-2017 “General Technical Conditions for Roll Cold Forming Machinery”, drafted by Zheng Liming Machinery, was officially implemented. The birth of this national standard completely ended the history of long-term lack of unified national standards for domestic roll cold forming machine R&D and manufacturing enterprises, becoming a programmatic document to standardize industry production, ensure product quality, and improve technical level, with epoch-making significance.
Huang Yizhong is deeply proud of this. He said: “From establishing local standards for export to formulating national industry standards today, this is a process of continuous sublimation of an enterprise’s sense of responsibility. Our goal is to make global customers associate reliable, precise, and high-quality cold roll equipment with Chinese standards when they see them.”
Up to now, as an industry technical leader, Huang Yizhong has taken the lead in formulating and releasing 4 national standards, 22 industry standards, and 2 local standards. Huang Yizhong and his team have completed a brilliant transformation from outstanding “manufacturers” to authoritative “rule-makers” and “industry leaders”.
### Steady Progress: Innovation Leading, Technology as the Foundation
Over the years, Zheng Liming has developed dozens of various forming machines, hydraulic uncoilers, pneumatic stackers, and C/Z purlin complete sets of equipment. Huang Yizhong believes that developing new products is of important strategic significance and an important pillar for enterprise survival and development. Launching new products can not only maintain the enterprise’s competitive advantage and position, but also help the enterprise better adapt to changes in the external environment and accelerate the spread and application of new technologies, new materials, and new processes. Zheng Liming’s innovative genes have borne fruitful wisdom fruits: up to now, the company has accumulated more than 130 invention patents, and Chairman Huang Yizhong and Xiamen Zheng Liming Machinery have a total of 100 core technologies with completely independent intellectual property rights, leading the industry’s technical direction. Honors are the best proof of their contributions: in 2016, he won the “Top Ten Craftsmen of Yincheng”; in September 2018, Zheng Liming successfully obtained the “Intellectual Property Management System Certification Certificate”, marking that its intellectual property management has entered a standardized, systematic, and international new stage; in November 2018, Huang Yizhong won the “Outstanding Talent Award of China Steel Structure Association”, achieving a “zero breakthrough” for the cold roll forming equipment industry in this authoritative award and becoming a recognized benchmark figure in the industry.
Looking forward to the future, Huang Yizhong’s eyes are firm and full of hope. With core independent intellectual property rights, leading industry standard formulation, a strong technical team, and a global vision, Xiamen Zheng Liming Metallurgical Machinery Co., Ltd. is striding forward confidently and steadily towards the grand goal of “from excellence to brilliance”. They are not only committed to becoming an outstanding leader in the global cold roll forming equipment field, but also shouldering the mission of making more high-quality, high-standard “Made in China, Intelligent in China” cold roll equipment shine on the world stage.