Company wins over global markets amid challenges

EARNING a place in the global markets is not easy for any enterprise. China Fangda Group Co. Ltd., a Chinese giant headquartered in Shenzhen, embarked on its own uneven journey to explore overseas markets, but the results were worth all the hardship, said Xiong Haigang, the assistant to the president of Fangda and general manager of Shenzhen Fangda Automatic System Co. Ltd.

The first private enterprise to go public on the Chinese mainland, Fangda was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange back in 1995. It has become a leading high-tech corporation in China with branch institutions in Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Africa.The company has business and projects in a broad variety of industries, including high-end curtain wall systems and the materials for glass walls, railway transport equipment and the new energy industry.

Fangda started to dive into the platform screen door (PSD) industry in 1999, investing increasingly large sums in the following four to five years. At a high-end position, the platform screen doors produced by Fangda enjoy a much higher reputation than other brands in the Chinese market.

As many as 21 cities in China have worked with Fangda to manufacture and install platform screen doors for their railways.“We are lucky to have grown up with the development of railway transport in major cities in China,” the general manager told the Shenzhen Daily last week at Fangda’s headquarters in Nanshan District.

According to Xiong, Fangda decided to export its PSD products in 2009. “We have visited many countries in Asia, Latin America and Europe to conduct market research and promote our brand, but very often, the railway transport companies in those countries did not trusted our technologies,” said Xiong.

He recalled that when they were attempting to bid for a PSD construction project in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for a railway to be especially built to transport pilgrims, the consultancy firms hired by the construction company strongly questioned Fangda’s abilities and the quality of their products despite the fact that Fangda had already earned a great reputation in China.

“They just put on tinted glasses when assessing our bidding proposals and posed lots of challenging questions. Eventually we lost the project,” said Xiong.Xiong and his team did not give up the idea of exploring overseas markets with their best technologies and services.The turning point appeared in 2012 when Fangda managed to win the bid for a PSD project for the Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) in Singapore thanks to the team’s countless efforts.

This was a valuable opportunity for Fangda to prove their products, so the team working in Singapore at that time even slept in the conference room for weeks to come up with the best design and solution for the project.Upon finishing the installation of the platform screen doors along the new metro line, the Singapore company was shocked to see how perfectly the doors fit the railway and praised Fangda’s work for having outperformed any supplier they had ever worked with.Xiong and his team turned in full marks on their exam, largely promoting Fangda’s reputation overseas. Since then, more orders have come along.

Currently, the company is working closely with railway projects in Singapore, China’s Taipei and Hong Kong, India, and Dubai, as well as some other regions and countries.