Shenma power line composite insulator is used in Qinghai-Tibet ±400kv Golmud ~Lhasa DC transmission project. Photo provided by the interviewee
It is difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to be refined and stronger. If it weren't for the hard work of persisting at the critical moment, a private technology enterprise called Jiangsu Shenma Electric Power Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Shenma) would have long become a passing cloud in the entrepreneurial craze.
In the 1990s, this company's first product was advertised, and customers from all over the country came in a flood. Because management cannot keep up, the orders, production and delivery are all messed up. The company's head drove more than 20,000 kilometers in half a month and explained to customers one by one. The small workshop pried open the floodgates of the market, but could not control the tide of demand, and almost choked to death, rising and falling.
html At the beginning of the 121st century, ABB, one of the three largest electrical companies in the world, wanted to acquire this Chinese company with annual revenue of only tens of millions of yuan three times, and once offered a price of several hundred million yuan. "Treat the company as a son or a piglet"? Staying and leaving is only a matter of thought.Ten years ago, a company launched the same project, poaching the company's technicians with high salaries, and the top secret technology was outflowed, and the employees were filled with people's hearts. Whether the company's intellectual property rights can be preserved is a lawsuit.
Three life and death moments, three life and death choices, rising and falling in the wave of reform and opening up. Turning problems into opportunities again and again, making innovation into solutions, and supplemented by a better and better business environment, can this small and medium-sized enterprise survive and be in a bright future.
The current Shenma holds a core product with international competitiveness and has won the National Science and Technology Progress Special Prize twice. International power industry giants have taken the initiative to cooperate with it. In the future, it will also target the global general contracting market for power grid engineering...
Continuously learn: growing from a small workshop to a large company
The problem is opportunity, no one can do it. If I do it, will the whole market belong to mine?
Shenma's story starts with "dream". In 1996, when the 25-year-old Ma Bin knocked on the door of an authoritative expert in Shenyang, the other party persuaded him to give up: "Young man, go back! For decades, thousands of companies across the country have not solved this problem. Can you do it?" It is normal for
to be despised. At that time, state-owned enterprises were carrying out reforms to focus on the big and let go of small and reduce staff and increase efficiency. The whole country was still discussing what proportion should the coexistence of multiple economic components be. Reform and development brought huge unknowns and doubts.
The newly established Shenma Company is just a small private workshop. Ma Bin and several other partners were just workers who had several years of experience working in the rubber factory. I wanted to solve the problem of oil leakage in power equipment, which is nothing different from a fantasy in many people.
is thrown into cold water by the industry authority, and most people will be discouraged, but Ma Bin feels very happy - "The problem is opportunity, no one can do it. If I do it, will the whole market be mine?"
for two years, he has looked for experts everywhere, conducted more than 1,000 experiments, and changed countless recipes. Finally, seals that are both oil-resistant and aging-resistant were developed, and technology filled the domestic gap.
1999, Shenma spent a lot of money to advertise in the industry's authoritative magazine "Transformer": Oil-free sealing, 30 years of life... In the first month, the only phone in the factory was blown up: the phone ringing rang from morning to night, and it was always busy after answering this and that. In the second month, the factory installed a second phone number, adding more people to answer the phone, and the situation improved slightly. In the 6th month, three phone calls were needed to accept order consultation. As Ma Bin imagined, this small workshop won most of the markets in the country. In more than a year, sales increased from several million yuan to tens of millions of yuan.
However, if you lose your horse, you will know the good and bad luck. While opening the floodgates of market demand, this small workshop also led to a flood of roaring towards it. Faced with rolling orders, not only the operator was in a hurry, but the production process and delivery arrangements were also in chaos. Production in order of orders, or delivery according to orders? The managers feel overwhelmed in any way they arrange. Bigger problems follow one after another - the carrots are fast and don't wash the mud, the product quality is uneven, hundreds of customers require returns...
The relationship between the company and the customer is like a boat and water, and water can carry a boat and can also overturn it. At that time, some people said that the divine horse was "a snake swallowed an elephant inadequately", and they were about to choke to death.At the critical moment, if any competitors start a price war, Shenma will definitely be killed and wiped out.
A car comes in handy. In the half month after the crisis, Ma Bin drove the car for more than 20,000 kilometers, which is equivalent to two round trips from the easternmost to the westernmost of China. He went door to door to explain to the customer: There is no problem with product quality, but there is a problem with the company's management. Please give Shenma some time.
"Time is money, efficiency is life." As a private entrepreneur, Ma Bin really felt the weight of this slogan in the environment of that time. During that time, he racked his brains every day to think about how to innovate management, worried that the company would destroy the challenges of competitors and the negative reviews of customers. If you find a way one day earlier, you can get out of the predicament one day earlier.
transit appears on a notification. By chance, Ma Bin saw a notice on the desk of a large enterprise in Rugao County at that time that the county was organizing leading cadres and entrepreneurs to attend MBA training at Tsinghua University. He felt a lit up: Isn’t this what I want to learn? He excitedly found the county leader. The leader told him: A company as small as Shenma is not within the scope of training.
After some soft and hard work, the leader felt relieved: "You can recommend it, but you can take care of the expenses!" "No problem!" This entrepreneur with only a junior high school education was overjoyed. After more than 10 years of returning to school, there is a rare opportunity and it is hungry. To this day, Ma Bin can still remember the names of the 13 courses he studied that year.
Returning from studying is like a tiger with wings. Ma Bin re-sorted the production and sales processes, and the company's operations have temporarily stabilized.
Ma Bin learned from his mistakes that the market is a double-edged sword, and if it grasps the demand, it must be able to meet the demand. Only engaged in R&D, only caring about sales, and not managing, the company cannot survive. If you want to manage your business well, entrepreneurs must constantly learn and constantly develop the ability to plan.
html At the turn of the first century, the state encouraged talents to flow to township enterprises. Many entrepreneurs have developed the "boss thinking" and "talent dependence". Their catchphrase is: "Don't understand? Just recruit people!""If you have such an understanding, you can't recruit real talents and can't use them well!" Ma Bin told his colleagues. If you have no rules for doing things and employed people, it will not only not produce benefits, but may also become a heavy burden.
Around 2009, Shenma was already a company with revenue of over 100 million yuan. The core product, substation insulator, has undergone many iterations, and the line insulator has been equipped with ultra-high voltage projects, multiple products, multiple production lines, hundreds of employees, global users...
1997 to 2007, IBM lasted 10 years and provided management consulting services worth billions of dollars to Huawei . Huawei has thus helped become one of the dazzling multinational companies in the world. Inspired by this, Ma Bin took out the total profit of more than 20 million yuan that year and asked IBM to help sort out the strategic process and establish the SAP information system. "The corporate structure suddenly opened up." A small workshop looked like a big company for the first time.
As soon as the situation opens, it gradually becomes a trend. Shenma has successively introduced Mercer Consulting to establish a standardized human resources management system, introduced PwC Management Consulting to form a group capital structure and management model, and introduced Ernst & Young Management Consulting to build an internal risk control system for the enterprise...
Now, Shenma's annual revenue is nearly 1 billion yuan, and its development path is becoming clearer and clearer.
three times not sold: China's ultra-high voltage is not choked
According to incomplete statistics, over the past ten years, the State Grid has saved more than 10 billion yuan in construction and operation and maintenance costs by relying solely on Shenma's substation composite insulators
In November 2003, Spain Marbella , rich people from all over the world are enjoying the brilliant coastal sunshine. Ma Bin, who was in his early 30s, broke into the World Insulator Conference (INMR) held here with a "plastic bucket". He kicked a stack of small cards in his pocket, which recorded how to take the bus and transfer. He doesn't understand foreign languages, and if the card is lost, it will be difficult for him to go home.
In a booth of less than 2 square meters, Ma Bin carefully put down his "plastic bucket" and hung out a piece of cardboard with only a few English letters and numbers on it: "HTV (material: high-temperature vulcanized silicone rubber), 110KV (applicable: 110 kV substation), 5000RMB (price: 5,000 yuan)". A box of carefully printed English business cards is placed next to the "plastic bucket".
For a long time, he could only stand foolishly at the booth, just like a stall by the overpass, wanting to shout a few words but feel guilty because of his incomprehension.
Fortunately, he is very confident. What he brought was a hollow composite insulator of high-temperature vulcanized silicone rubber material that was the first to develop successfully in the country. "I came to tell my international colleagues that the Chinese have created such a thing! Standing here, I have already won!" He comforted himself like this, with a smile on his face. Every time someone comes, he will send someone a business card.
At the World Insulator Conference, Professor of Electrical Engineering of Tsinghua University Liang Xidong always thought he was the only Chinese present. Because, for many years, he was the only one who spoke at the INMR conference to report on the progress of the research and development and application of insulators in China. Until he met Ma Bin, a newborn calf-like Chinese exhibition entrepreneur. Later, Liang Xidong became Ma Bin's free translation, and Marbella Beach caused a lot of sensation because of these two Chinese.
Dan, the head of the insulator project of ABB, one of the three major international power equipment manufacturers, ran to Ma Bin's booth three times to ask questions. At that time, the price of similar products of ABB Company exceeded 10,000 yuan.
In 2005, Dan found the Shenma headquarters in Rugao, Jiangsu. Ma Bin thought he was here to buy products, so he took him to transfer the entire factory. In 2006, a financial manager of ABB came to visit the company, looking like a master, pointing to a vacant land and telling Ma Bin how ABB planned to use the land. As soon as I returned to the office, the financial supervisor asked Shenma Company if it was sold. Ma Bin suddenly realized that ABB had figured out the situation and wanted to acquire Shenma. He answered firmly, "Don't sell!" Afterwards, the financial supervisor came again, and Ma Bin still said one thing: "Don't sell!"
In 2007, Ma Bin was invited to the luxuriously decorated ABB Beijing headquarters. He felt the huge gap - the company headquarters is more than ten floors, and Shenma's office building is only a few floors. ABB had strong financial resources, and Shenma's annual revenue was only tens of millions at that time... ABB boss looked at Ma Bin with his hands crossed his hands:
"You offer the price!"
"I don't plan to sell!"
"I know your net assets, I can give you a few times, or even 10 times, premium!"
This means that the asset premium will reach hundreds of millions of yuan. In those years, real estate was in full swing. Some people said that if Ma Bin had sold the company and used the money to speculate on real estate, he would probably have half of the houses in the entire Gaocheng now.
However, at that time, Ma Bin did not think about selling this company that was raised like raising a child. "The first time I told you not to sell it, but today I still told you not to sell it!"
met and ended in a bad mood. Ma Bin felt very excited, "Why are foreign companies awesome? They don't rely on monopoly on the market? Now we break the monopoly. As long as the product quality is better than theirs, there will definitely be a market." Thinking of this, I secretly prepared to bear the pressure from large companies after the negotiations broke down.
The storm did not come. In 2008, ABB turned to comprehensively cooperate with Shenma, including Shenma into the strategic supplier sequence, and even gradually shifted from producing similar products to Shenma procurement. A chain reaction occurred. Japan Special Ceramics Co., Ltd. (NGK), once the "leader" of the global substation insulator (ceramic) market, closed the production base of Suzhou and exited the substation insulator market because of the disadvantage in competition.
, Siemens, the world's second largest electrical equipment manufacturer, has closed its own factory to cooperate with Shenma because of its competitiveness. GE, the world's third largest electrical equipment manufacturer, clearly stated after contacting Shenma that it will not acquire Shenma and then carry out global cooperation with Shenma.
The later industry development made Ma Bin sigh. If he had sold the company, he might have been free, but this company would have been dead for the country. A friend joked that Ma Bin almost became a "national sinner."
html At the beginning of the 121st century, China's substation insulators above 500 kV were almost all imported, resulting in high construction costs of the State Grid and unsupported construction periods. The construction of the 750 kV power transmission and transformation project in the northwest was delayed many times due to the untimely delivery of insulators by foreign companies.In 2006, China began to build a 1,000 kV ultra-high voltage AC test demonstration project from southeast Shanxi-Nanyang-Jingmen, which is the world's first ultra-high voltage transmission project.At that time, only one foreign company could produce traditional porcelain insulators that met the needs of ultra-high voltage, and the price was as high as 10 million yuan per unit. Seeing that China's ultra-high pressure is going to be "bottled" by others.
At that time, each substation composite insulator built by Shenma was sold for only 680,000 yuan, which could also avoid the inherent disadvantages of porcelain insulators. After repeated investigations, relevant state departments have fully used Shenma’s insulators, and Shenma has since formed an indissoluble bond with China’s ultra-high voltage.
Now, almost all AC ultra-high voltage substations in China and more than 95% of DC ultra-high voltage substations use Shenma insulators. According to incomplete statistics, over the past ten years, the State Grid has saved more than 10 billion yuan in construction and operation and maintenance costs by relying solely on Shenma's substation composite insulators.
In 2012 and 2017, Ma Bin and Shenma Electric won the National Science and Technology Progress Special Prize twice for their contributions to UHV projects.
"It would be a pity that this private enterprise was sold that year!" Lu Yansun , former deputy minister of the Ministry of Machinery Industry and senior expert consultant of the China Machinery Quality Association, still remembers this past. As one of the people who advocated that they could not be sold, he felt that playing the "Made in China" game requires division of labor and cooperation and close cooperation between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises.
Protecting innovation: Intellectual property is the lifeline
"Protecting intellectual property is protecting innovation, and stabilizing intellectual property companies have confidence!" Ma Bin said that this is his most painful feeling as a small and medium-sized enterprise
In December 2018, Shenma Company received 300,000 yuan from a company in Hebei. Although it was just a small amount of money, it made the whole company feel happy.
It turns out that remittance companies imitate Shenma's products and seize the market at low prices, causing a bad impact. After a year and a half lawsuit, the other party finally accepted the punishment.
However, in the power equipment industry where the intellectual property protection situation is not optimistic, there are very few cases of successful rights protection. As a leading enterprise in the power insulator industry, Shenma has encountered numerous infringements of all sizes. Many years ago, Shenma almost went bankrupt due to an intellectual property case.
In 2009, a company in other province planned to produce hollow composite insulators and issued recruitment invitations to several technical personnel of Shenma Company. Technicians Liu and Li resigned from Shenma Company one after another, took away some production technical materials, took up work in this company under a pseudonym, and participated in product development. The company trial-produced a composite insulator product, and Shenma sued the company, leading to the first commercial secret infringement case in Nantong City with a huge impact.
This lawsuit lasted for 5 years. During this period, Shenma's technical department encountered personnel turmoil. A company attracted talents with its treatment and shares, and many technical personnel from Shenma Company quietly ran to "spot". If all talents are poached, the technology is taken over in a set, and the product encounters a price war, it will be eliminated in a few rounds. At that time, Ma Bin couldn't sleep or eat, and was always worried that the company that had been working hard for many years would be destroyed.
In 2013, on the day of the case verdict, Zhang Yueshu, deputy director of the Tongzhou District People's Court of Nantong City, read out the verdict. Ma Bin said excitedly: "After this case, we can manage the company's stable development for ten years!"
In fact, ten years is not enough, and both enterprises and the country need long-term stability. According to relevant national strategic plans, the rate of power equipment independence will reach 90% by 2020, which means that more power equipment companies will need to be protected by intellectual property rights.
How to enable more companies to obtain intellectual property protection and make rare cases a benchmark for industry rights protection? Rugao Procuratorate Sun Ya, when reviewing this major case ten years ago, recommended the establishment of an "intellectual property protection alliance".
In 2018, the Rugao Intellectual Property Protection Alliance, which was participated by judicial organs, administrative organs, enterprises and legal service agencies, was established. Shenma Electric Power and Rugao Municipal People's Procuratorate are both initiators.
"Protecting intellectual property rights is protecting innovation, and stabilizing intellectual property rights enterprises have confidence!" Ma Bin said that this is his most painful feeling as a small and medium-sized enterprise operator.
Going to the world: Only with dreams can there be a future
"In the past, we thought that Chinese products were competitive because they had the advantage of labor prices, but in fact they had the most advanced technology in the world."
In December 2018, two young Chinese people under 30 years old and who did not understand Portuguese at all, wore short-sleeved short-sleeved entry into the B3 exchange in Brazil, just like their boss Ma Bin went to Spain alone more than ten years ago.
Brazil's National Electricity Administration is there to bid for a $3.5 billion BOT grid construction project. Shenma Electric Power cooperated with Brazilian Power Grid Company to participate in the bidding and hit the ring to Brazil in one go.
is mostly power giants with global revenue of over 10 billion US dollars, and fund companies with fund size of over 10 billion US dollars. No one takes the annual revenue of only about 680 million RMB seriously, and he doesn't even realize its existence.
In the end, the cooperation team won a project worth RMB 1.098 billion. Through this bidding, Shenma completed an important debut and attracted high attention from international power peers. It will soon launch the power grid EPC engineering general contracting service around the world. This means that a company that makes core components will expand to a longer industrial chain.
This time, Shenma still holds a trump card in his hand. In the bidding, its optimized power grid construction plan helped partners reduce construction costs by 5%. Like the world's leading insulator products back then, this solution is also a bombshell. In the construction of power projects with an investment scale of hundreds or hundreds of billions of yuan, savings of 1 percentage point means huge profits and benefits.
3 months later, the Spanish company that won the top 3 bids in this bidding came to China and actively sought cooperation with Shenma. Immediately afterwards, more winning companies followed...
Buyers vote with their feet is the simplest business rule. The steps of foreign companies show their closeness to China's manufacturing. But many people did not expect that the threshold that was cut this time would be a small and medium-sized Chinese enterprise.
In August 2005, Clotte Di Torrey, a former insulator technology expert of the International Electrotechnical Commission, wrote in INMR magazine after returning from Shenma: "In the past, we thought that Chinese products were competitive because they had the advantage of labor prices, but in fact they had the most advanced technology in the world... When I returned from the insulator factory in China located in the north of Shanghai, I think Western suppliers need to worry about their ability to remain competitive in the international market in the future. After this visit, I think there is no need to worry anymore, because everything is too late..."
In April 2019, the north bank of the Sutong Bridge, Shenma Electric Power Intelligent Chemical Factory is in full swing. The flow of people and traffic entering and leaving the construction site is like the flowing water of the Yangtze River several kilometers away.
"The great era creates excellent enterprises and entrepreneurs. The continuous prosperity and development of small and medium-sized enterprises is a vivid footnote to the continuous deepening of reform and opening up." Cai Weici, deputy director of the Expert Committee of the China Mechanical Industry Federation, said with emotion that it is precisely because of the continuous improvement of business management level, the continuous enhancement of entrepreneurs' awareness of being refined and strengthened, and the effective protection of corporate intellectual property rights, that Shenma Electric has gained the status of "hidden champion" in the global composite insulator field.
From being dangerous to spreading around the world, Shenma may no longer be a small and medium-sized enterprise in the future, but it may also interpret more ups and downs and exciting stories.
