In Yongkang in April, a dialogue about the future of China’s hardware industry is underway.
The Yongwujin Industrial Belt has ushered in a historic moment, bringing together all entities upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, as well as at home and abroad.
There are buyers here from Russia, Turkey, Zimbabwe and other countries co-building the “Belt and Road”, manufacturers from Yongkang, Wuyi, Wenling, Ningbo, and even Jiangsu, as well as builders of industrial service platforms. They are all re-examining their positioning and exploring new development possibilities.
In this dialogue about the future of the industry, Xu Weiqiang, chairman of Mailian Group, outlined a clear framework for industrial transformation.
He pointed out that the current core contradiction of China’s manufacturing industry is a high degree of excess on the production side and insufficient supply on the service side.
“The profits of the entire industry chain can be divided into five levels: manufacturing, standards, brands, import distribution, and retail. However, most traditional domestic manufacturing companies only earn profits on the manufacturing side.” The direction of transformation is to guide companies to extend to the service side and earn value at both ends of the smile curve.
With the help of digital AI technology, the transformation cycle that originally took ten or twenty years can be compressed to one to two years.
He also predicted that public brands will account for half of the brand market in the future. Mailian has connected with more than 500 companies, and plans to cooperate with colleges and universities to recruit international students from countries that jointly build the “Belt and Road”. After training, they will return to their home countries to provide localized services, so that Made in China will move from “selling products” to “selling services.”
Russian hardware buyer Yevgeny has known Mailian for a long time. He believes that Mailian is a platform full of possibilities.
On the Mailian platform, he can quickly and effectively obtain procurement resources.
Despite the complex global economic situation, China’s supply chain resources have brought him certainty.
He said that in the minds of Russian buyers, Zhejiang is the first choice region for hardware procurement. He estimates that the purchase amount in the field of power tools will be as high as 3 billion rubles (approximately RMB 266 million), as well as diversified business lines such as garden tools and hand tools.
Gokhan from Türkiye is also very fond of China’s supply chain.
His company was founded in 1967 and has more than 2,000 store customers in the Turkish market, with overseas sales channels covering more than 20 countries and regions.
He has visited China for 22 consecutive years and believes that Yongkang is one of the best sources for purchasing hardware products.
He is optimistic about future cooperation with Mailian and Yongkang hardware manufacturers, and plans to expand business scale year by year.
On that day, the Mailian Regional Ukraine Service Center and the British Regional Service Center were officially signed and established.
For manufacturing companies in the industrial belt, moving from “OEM” to “Brand overseas” is a difficult problem to be solved.
It took Chen Dijiong, the head of Ningbo Purity Tools Co., Ltd., 10 years to grow revenue from 0 to 30 million yuan. After cooperating with Mailian, the revenue increased to 70 million yuan. Orders from countries co-building the “Belt and Road” accounted for 60% of the total business volume.
Yangzhou Weikailai Optoelectronic Instrument Equipment Co., Ltd. has achieved rapid development after cooperating with Mailian. It has also added multiple new categories and plans to use Mailian’s overseas warehouses to improve the immediacy of logistics.
Wu Peixiang, executive general manager of Taifu Pump Industry, believes that cooperation with Mailian is one of the important factors for the company’s 25% year-on-year revenue growth in 2025.
He is optimistic about the “seven major services that can be replicated” model and believes that this will be a new paradigm for China’s manufacturing industry to transform and upgrade overseas.
Yan Zhili, the founder of Zimbabwe’s YZL Group, is also optimistic about cooperation with Mailian. He realizes that Chinese companies have a limited window to go overseas to build their own brands and cannot remain in the global OEM parts manufacturing process.
China’s hardware industry is moving toward the world with a new attitude. In the transformation and cooperation of the industrial belt, all parties are looking for new opportunities to jointly promote Chinese hardware products to the global market.
