Comparison and Analysis of China’s 3 Largest Fastener Manufacturing Bases

It is known that there are nearly 10,000 fastener manufacturing and trading companies in China with over 1 million employees. Chinese carbon steel fasteners are mainly used in automotive, electronics, machinery, building, and industrial applications. Through years of development, China has become the largest fastener manufacturing country around the world and locations including Wenzhou, Yongnian, and Haiyan are the main manufacturing heartlands with their own features.

Yongnian in Hebei Province, one of the fastener manufacturing heartlands in China, is highly admired. Through over 30 years of development, Yongnian now has over 2,300 fastener companies, forming a large industrial cluster and business network. 87 fastener companies in the city have been certified by ISO 2000 so far. The total investment in facilities in 2014 reached over CNY0.2 billion and the annual fastener production was 2.47 million metric tons (sales: CNY17.3 billion). Its production and sales represent 40% of the national market share. Advantages: Nearly half of the national sales are generated from this city and the local government offers more favorable measures to support the fastener industry every year.

Disadvantages: Although the industrial scale is very big, there are no efficient integration of prices and strong competitiveness of products. Their costs of material purchasing and pricing are often dominated by others.

Zhejiang Haiyan, usually called “the hometown of fasteners”, now has over 700 fastener companies (some 100 companies can be considered “big companies”). They mainly produce about 14,000 kinds of standard fasteners, nuts, and high strength long bolts. The total fastener production in the city in 2006 was over 1 million metric tons and the sales reached CNY4 billion. 70% of the production is for exports with the value totaling nearly USD0.2 billion. 50% of the nut exports in the Zhejiang Province are generated in this city while the production and exports of long threaded rods are in the lead throughout the entire nation.

Advantages: Leading companies including Gem-Year Industrial are located here, which can be a locomotive to lead the industrial development forward and boost the fast development of medium or small fastener enterprises. In addition, the public service platforms for the fastener industry such as national fastener market, national fastener testing center and fastener surface treatment center have been well established, which successfully formed a complete industrial supply chain from materials, production, to machine production.

Disadvantages: Quality control reports made in different cities of China reveal that fasteners produced in Haiyan seem to show more problems of product quality. In addition, most of the companies in the city rely on foreign orders. As a result, if the economic situations in other countries are not good, the companies in Haiyan will suffer more influences.

Wenzhou fastener industry started in 1970’s. The history of the local fastener industry has been over 30 years. There are more than 3,000 fastener companies in Wenzhou and many of them are still small companies managed by husbands and wives. However, the development has been recently fast and over 200 companies are considered “big companies.” The annual production is over 1 million metric tons and the annual production value is about CNY10 billion. About 30% of the national market share is taken by Wenzhou.