Gear art: New trade for old business in nation's rust belt

SHENYANG－It was an exhibition all about gears: motocycles, tanks, figurines and animals, all made out of shining gears of various sizes welded together.

The gears were once overstocked products in Shenyang Precision and Power Transmission Equipment Co Ltd, but are now made into artwork exhibited in workshops, selling for millions of yuan each year.

SPPTE, founded in 1953 in China's northeast rust belt province of Liaoning, was a subsidiary of State-owned Shenyang Machine Tool (Group) Co Ltd, mainly supplying gears to the conglomerate.

Liaoning, Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces have been struggling for growth following the decline of their traditional heavy industries. Local companies have been looking for new market opportunities.

The gear business in SPPTE started to shrink in 2012, as SMTCL adopted new CNC (computer numerical control) machine tools that only required several gears to build, instead of more than a hundred in previous models.

"The change led to a large loss of our market," said Liu Zhenmin, general manager of the company. "Like many traditional State-owned companies, we lagged behind the market change."

In 2013, there were around 50 metric tons of overstocked gears in the company warehouse. The small ones are about the size of a coin and the large ones can weigh up to a ton.

"We didn't know what to do. We even thought about selling them as scrap metal," said Zheng Xiaowei, secretary of the company's Party working committee.

One kilogram of gears costs around 60 yuan ($9) to make, but can only be sold for 1 yuan per kilogram as scrap metal.

"The loss was too big, and workers found it hard to see their work sold at such a low price," said Zheng, who finally dismissed the idea.

Zheng continued to do market research and noticed the booming creative industry. He gradually developed the idea of welding the gears together to create artwork.

He set up a project exploring the idea. At first, the company lacked experience and spent months to make just one or two products.

"We tried making maps, wagons, and animals at first, but in fact, they didn't look real," said project manager Shen Yi. "The cattle we made looked like horses."

The breakthrough came when two workers in the company used the gears to make a mini motocycle, which was accepted by the city's travel department in 2015 as a souvenir marking the city's glorious industrial past.

"We received our first order from the travel department thanks to the motocycle," Zheng said. "The gear-made motorcycle conveys a strong industrial style."

With that initial success, the company set up a workshop. In 2017, the gear artwork brought in more than 5 million yuan in revenue for the firm.

"Now we are making helicopters and human figures with the gears," Zheng said, "We are also foraying into outdoor products."

"Many enterprises in the old industrial base are transforming their structures, and there are many possibilities. Ultimately they need to work to meet the changing market," said Liang Qidong, vice-dean of Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences.

Xinhua