China set to make own ballpoint pen tips
SOE Tisco attains a breakthrough in the making of special steel, stirs debate on quality
State-owned Taiyuan Iron and Steel (Group) Co plans to mass-produce ballpoint pen tips and replace imports in two years, company officials said on Tuesday.
The group has spent five years on research and development to acquire the technology, ending a long-term Chinese reliance on imported pen tips.
Without this technology, China’s pen manufacturers, which produce 38 billion ballpoint pens per year, have had to purchase the crucial component from overseas markets, costing the industry $17.3 million a year, according to the China National Light Industry Council.
“It will be one of our characteristic products in the long run, and we will try more materials for tips of ballpoint pens to remain competitive,” said Li Jianmin, director of TISCO’s research and development center.
Wang Huimian, TISCO’s senior engineer, said the company will invest more financial resources and manpower to develop next-generation ballpoint pen tips in an environmentally friendly way to further compete with rivals in Japan and Switzerland.
“If these real economy-related factors are under developed,it score competitiveness won’t be strong,” said Wang.
The pen tip issue was first brought into the spotlight by Premier Li Keqiang in January last year, offering an insight into a major issue confronting Chinese manufacturers — weak competitiveness in core technology.
Making such products requires high-precision machinery and ultra-thin steel plates. Special microelements must be added to liquid steel to make a quality tip that can write continually for at least 800 meters.
Eager to enhance its earning ability, the company announced that it plans to produce 10.5 million metric tons of steel this year, including 4.5 million stainless steel products.
Zhao Ying, a researcher at the Institute of Industrial Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said State-owned enterprises will no longer just carry out industrial reshuffling, resource streamlining and cutting of excessive production capacity.
“All these elements can be reached only through longterm investment and incremental development,” he said.
Shanxi-based Taiyuan Iron & Steel Co Ltd, or Tisco, one of China’s major stainless steel producers, has independently developed the special steel needed to make the feedstock for ballpoint pen tips. It is hoped this will replace the annual import of 1,000 metric tons of special steel for making the pen tips.
“The feedstock, as small as it is (only 2.3 millimeters thick), requires an exact proportion of microelements,” said Wang Huimian, senior engineer of Taiyuan Iron and Steel.
With 26 years’ experience of working in technological development teams, Wang said that the ballpoint pen feedstock is a tough nut to crack.
“The steel requires the exactly right proportion of a number of special microelements to maximize the pen’s performance. Even a small difference in the proportions of the elements would affect the final quality. If the right proportions could not be found, China would always have to rely on imports,” said Wang.
The tip of a ballpoint pen is made up of two parts: the tungsten carbide ball for writing and the feedstock for holding the ball. China produces and exports the tungsten carbide ball. But the feedstock relies on imports from countries such as Switzerland and Japan.
China’s overall iron and steel output is in excess. Yet most of the overcapacity is in ordinary and low-quality products. The country still has to import a lot of technology intensive special steel.
The country makes 38 billion ballpoint pens every year, the biggest in the world. But it has to import more than 1,000 tons of steel for pen tips for 120,000 yuan ($17,386) per ton.
Taiyuan Iron & Steel’s project for developing homegrown feedstock started five years ago in collaboration with Beifa Group, one of China’s largest makers of ballpoint pens based in Ningbo, Zhejiang province.
Li Jianmin, technological director of Taiyuan Iron & Steel, said that additives in the steel affect the ability of the final product to resist corrosion. The quality of the feedstock is controlled by strictly managing the additives at every stage, including rolling, wire-drawing and heat treatment.
“The proportion of microelements that overseas companies use is usually a top secret. Taiyuan Iron & Steel has deciphered the proportion independently through thousands of experiments,” said Li.
The developers drew inspiration from making dough.
“If you want dough to be of just the right softness, you need additives. It’s the same with steel. The ordinary additives are in the shape of lumps. If they can be made fine and smooth, the liquid steel and the additives will be more evenly blended,” said Wang.
The technological breakthrough has pushed up the stock price of the Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel Co Ltd, the group’s subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. From Jan 9 to 11, its stock price rose by 27.4 percent to 5.12 yuan.