Qingdao Sentury Tire Co., Ltd was established in 2009. The company, which took the lead in setting up a world advanced tire industry 4.0 smart factory in China and produced the world’s first graphene tire, is the first private enterprise in China to possess aircraft tire manufacturing technologies. Current business of Sentury accounts for 80% of the international market, its Thailand factory has been put into use while its American factory is going to be constructed.
Lin Yilong, general manager of Qingdao Sentury, remarked that, the performance of China’s tire products will be better and the competitiveness of tire brands will be strengthened in the future as intelligent manufacturing developed. Now there are 500 tire enterprises with low brand recognition and production efficiency, this number may turn into 50 or even less in the future after enterprises integrated.
Different from many domestic tire enterprises, Sentury started tire production from that of high-end passenger vehicles, aiming at the international market and producing passenger vehicle tires only. Now it occupies 80% shares of the global market, while 20% occupancy of domestic market.
Sentury has had customers from more than 150 countries and regions, including Asia, North America, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Oceania, etc. According to America’s UHP tires ranking of market shares in 2015, Delinte, the Sentury affiliated brand, topped NO.13 with a market share of 2.5%, while Landsail and Sentury occupied more than 3% of the market shares in European tires market.
Sentury has confirmed its idea of “Creating the World First Class Tire Brand” since its establishment, and carried out a lot of work related to this. Firstly, it takes high-quality, high performance and green tires as the emphasis of the company; secondly, the company attaches great importance to R&D input; thirdly, it focuses on talent introduction; fourthly, Sentury tried a lot in intelligent manufacturing; fifthly, it formed “3+1” development strategy with the construction of three factories in Qingdao, Thailand and America and aircraft tires production bases; and the last, Sentury promoted internal management severely.
On 3th June, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China issued “An Application Project List for Integrated Standardization and New Patterns of Intelligent Manufacturing of 2016”, Sentury became the only involved tire enterprise.
Sentury implemented a “three-step” pattern in the construction of smart factories, to build the factories with scientific designing and planning ideas, the most advanced checkout equipment for mechanized production of the world, and an independent researched and developed “Sentury Intelligent Management System” to control the whole process of intelligent manufacturing.
Intelligent manufacturing has provided powerful guarantee for Sentury’s tires performance. In tire tests organized by the third-party organizations of Europe and America in recent 3 years, all products performance of Sentury ranked in the top 8, with some of the indexes surpassed international brands and received extensive attention of global tire industry.
