Nine times out of ten the steel tape measures you buy in hardware stores are produced in Shaogang Town, Yucheng County, Shangqiu, Henan.
As the recognized “Hometown of Steel Tape Measures in China”, the total annual production of steel tape measures here is about 1.5 billion pieces. It not only occupies more than 85% of the domestic retail market, but also accounts for more than 65% of the global market, accounting for more than 60% of the country’s total steel tape measure exports, and its products are exported to more than 120 countries and regions around the world.
At present, Yucheng County has gathered nearly a thousand companies related to tools and measuring tools, and has formed a full-chain industrial cluster covering raw material production, parts processing, finished product assembly, offline wholesale, and cross-border e-commerce sales. More than 30 kinds of parts required for steel tape measures can be produced and purchased locally, without the need to transfer goods from outside. This not only greatly reduces production costs, but also greatly improves order delivery efficiency, which has become the core advantage for many downstream purchasers to choose goods from Yucheng.
The annual output value of the entire steel tape measure industry has reached about 12 billion yuan, creating employment for more than 100,000 local people. The local area has also built a national-level steel tape measure and hardware tool quality inspection center, and is a nationally recognized high-tech industrialization base for measuring tools.
The steel tape measure industry in Yucheng started in the 1980s. At first, villagers in Shaogang Town just picked up scrap ruler strips discarded by steel plants, hand-processed them into simple tape measures and sold them in the market. They relied on the small family workshop model to gradually accumulate experience and spread technology, attracting more and more local people to join the industry, and gradually formed a large-scale industrial cluster.
After more than 40 years of development, the local area has long bid farewell to the low-end manual processing stage. In addition to ordinary civilian tape measures, it also mass-produces high-end products such as smart tape measures with digital display, laser distance measuring tapes, voice reporting measuring tapes, and industrial-grade high-precision tape measures. Many products have independent invention patents and are very popular in domestic and overseas markets.
In order to consolidate industrial competitiveness, local companies have firmly grasped the core links of the entire industry chain: the steel strip, the core component of the tape measure, is stretched using special steel and then undergoes a special heat treatment process to be rust-proof and resistant to bending; the ruler shell is made of ABS plastic or metal injection molding material, which is brightly colored and anti-fall and durable; the spring responsible for the automatic retraction function is made of high-carbon steel, which has long-lasting elasticity and is not easy to relax; the scale printing uses laser or screen printing technology, the lines are clear and not easy to fall off.
The entire process from raw materials to finished products is basically completed within the town, with high production efficiency and stable quality. Even in special periods of global supply chain fluctuations, stable supply can be guaranteed. Regular testing by the national quality inspection center has also stabilized the product qualification rate at more than 99%, helping companies successfully obtain market access qualifications in various countries.
Nowadays, Yucheng’s steel tape measures not only cover almost all domestic hardware retail and building materials markets, but merchants from traditional small commodity distribution centers such as Yiwu and Wenzhou also come to Yucheng all year round to purchase and stock up. The export market covers Europe, America, Southeast Asia and other regions: German industrial companies purchase high-precision industrial tape measures produced by Yucheng, and the American construction market uses a large number of locally produced laser rangefinders. Voice tape measures adapted to multi-lingual broadcasts are also very popular in the African market.
At present, local companies are still promoting the intelligent upgrading of products and developing intelligent measurement products that can be linked to mobile APPs. In the future, measurement data can be directly synchronized to mobile devices, further expanding the use scenarios of the products. The small steel tape measure is releasing greater industrial potential in the hands of Yucheng people.
