Miller Magazine Issue: 121 January 2020

61 TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM MILLER / JANUARY 2020 Zuo Kun, General Manager of China Pingle Group gave an exclusive interview to Miller Magazine on the trend in the world milling industry, the state of the Chinese milling sector and Pingle’s future objectives. First of all, could you please provide us with some brief background information on your company and its activities? Hebei Pingle Flour Machinery Group Co., Ltd. started as a plant in 1991 and is a group company that focuses on grain machinery engineering equipment manufacture with diver- sified business operations. Its main business is production and operation of turn-key projects of 9-1000T flour machin- ery complete-equipment of various models, and contracting to undertake turn-key projects of 100-1000T steel structure complete-equipment; moreover, it has further developed special productive equipment of coarse cereals such as maize and brewing and can provide scientific and perfect solutions to fine processing equipment and process tech- nology of coarse cereals. What kind of role and place does Pingle has in China and also in the world in its operating industry? Could you tell us how Pingle has come to its current position? In the global cereal milling industry, Wuxi Buhler’s equip- ment, Turkey’s equipment, and Pingle’s equipment all have some market share. Wuxi Buhler has brand accumulation of years, extensive business scope and good product quality with expensive prices. Turkey, near Europe, has the advan- tage of customer recognition relying on location advantage, but the product quality is irregular. As a result of innovative development in the past 30 years, Pingle has presently become the grain processing enter- prise with the strongest comprehensive capacity of design, production, installation and the like in the Chinese milling industry. All of key core equipment in the milling industry can be designed and produced on an independent basis, and complete sets of engineering services can be provided to customers. Particularly in Africa, India, and CIS countries, Pingle’s equipment holds a competitive edge in the product quality, and Pingle excels in the business competition in Ta- jikistan, Syria, etc.. In the whole international market, Pingle’s equipment quality, the extent of automation and globalized services have received recognition and support from more custom- ers, and these customers choose Pingle as a strategic part- ner. Pingle has reached a leading role in this industry in both domestic and overseas markets. Pingle’s all business oper- ations merely center around the quality guideline that satis- fies customer demands with market orientation, top quali- ty, and best services. This means that Pingle takes market demands as the orientation of technological innovation in each development, and keeps R&D of new products and improvement of product quality so as to satisfy customer demands. Can you tell us about the state of the milling machin- ery industry in China? Wheat is the main food in China. The wheat milling indus- try, as the basic and main traditional industry to satisfy hu- man food demands, has had a tremendous change wholly over the last ten years. Firstly, the wheat milling industry has been turning towards large scale and group development. The direct data is that the Chinese wheat milling enterprises have developed from more than ten thousand ten years ago up to the present less than 7,000 over the last ten years. With the acceleration of large scale and group development, wheat milling enterprises will continue to decrease, and ca- pacity of production will be quickly concentrated in strong enterprises, which will make the strong stronger and the weak weaker, thus the strong will win and the weak die out. Secondly, the traditional wheat milling has started to pro- duce safe and healthy products according to market de- mands and meanwhile lay more emphasis on product qual- ity and innovation of product categories instead of following the original track of “fixing production according to pur- chase, and fixing sale according to production” in the past. Thirdly, the Chinese wheat processing equipment and tech- nologies are more advanced, with the extent of automation being higher and higher. With acceleration of the Chinese re- form and openness and introduction and innovation of over- seas advanced technologies, the gap between China and developed countries in technologies of milling automation becomes smaller and smaller, and the Chinese technologies has held some market share in Southeast Asia, Africa, Cen- tral Asia, etc.. Lastly, competition in quality and brands has become normal. The Chinese residents lay more emphasis on safety and health in daily consumption, and tend towards higher-end products. In the tendency of consumer market segmentation and high-quality orientation, product quality and brands will become the key to win the market. Can you give us some information about your facili- ties and production capacity? Pingle pursues innovation-driven development and keeps updating and upgrading of production and process- ing equipment. Presently Pingle has advanced processing and testing equipment such as German-made CNC laser cutting machines, CNC bending machines, horizontal ma- chining centers, vertical machining centers, welding robots, and coordinate measuring machines, follows the production