The PUSH Group recipe for success

Located in Yibin, a large city in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, the PUSH Group has attracted widespread attention on account of its drastic speed of development and excellent performance in recent years.

Visitors to the PUSH Group headquarters cannot help but wonder how a simple workshop could become a modern hi-tech enterprise group within 10 years. What constitutes the strength behind the group that raised its annual output value from 28 million yuan to more than 4 billion yuan within a decade?

Born to be a giant

PUSH Group began its business as a workshop to produce bottle caps for Wuliangye liquor in the late 1990s.

The growing popularity of Wuliangye liquor over a decade ago had led to the appearance of a number of counterfeit products on the market.

This prompted Wuliangye Liquor Brewery, one of China's top liquor giants, to invest heavily in the fight against counterfeits by introducing security technology and anti-counterfeit measures.

Wuliangye sought cooperation with an Italian company, which at that time possessed the world's most advanced production technology, in the hope of developing its own counterfeit-proof bottle caps.

The Italian company turned down the cooperation plan because it did not believe that Chinese companies could produce world-class counterfeit-proof bottle caps.

Wuliangye then decided to develop the bottle caps itself and invested 200 million yuan in 1997 to establish its own anti-counterfeit bottle cap workshop or the 615 Workshop, the predecessor of the PUSH Group.

Li Peiqi became the first director of the anti-counterfeit bottle cap workshop.

Over the following years, the workshop developed several types of world-class advanced anti-counterfeit bottle caps and subsequently began mass production.

The workshop grew to become the PUSH Group, which can now produce 2 billion anti-counterfeit bottle caps a year, not only meeting the needs of Wuliangye Liquor but winning orders from dozens of other companies from home and abroad.

The company has now formed two pillar sectors - machinery manufacture and polymeric materials and processing.

From strength to strength

In 1998, the workshop became an independent company with Li Peiqi as the general manager.

The company then extended its chain to form six industrial zones - A (plastic anti-counterfeit bottle cap), B (bottle preforms), C (mold), D (bottle cap), E (packaging and building materials) and F (PET raw materials).

The firm's diversified development scheme is based on the extension of the existing industries, which helps it gain advantages in both management and resource integration.

Building core competency

To build up its core competency, PUSH began construction of a world-class mold workshop several years ago.

Dubbed "the mother of industry," mold has important links with the development of modern production, the level of automation, processing technology and manufacturing technology.

In the early days of the company, almost all the molds used in production were imported from overseas in order to guarantee the quality of products. The long import cycle and high cost became major obstacles in the path of the company's further development.

The birth of the mold workshop had a major influence on the country's manufacturing sector as it had gathered the world's most advanced manufacturing equipment and software and laid a solid foundation for the company's future meteoric growth.

Today, PUSH has become China's sixth largest car body mold provider and has been named a "Chinese key mold enterprise".

More than 70 percent of its mold products are ordered by overseas and foreign-funded companies like Toyota, Ford, Renault, Mazda, FAW-Volkswagen, Guangzhou Honda, Chongqing Chang'an, Suzuki, Samsung and Philips.

Some mold technologies of the company rank among leading technologies in China.

In June 2003, the PUSH Group was established with Li Peiqi as its CEO.

The group aims to be an icon of modern manufacturing under its slogan - "Every Pusher is a pusher."

The group's sales revenue in 2006 was about 150 times of that in 1998.

To become an international modern company, the PUSH Group has adhered to the principle of "maintaining synchronous development with the world and becoming a companion of the consumers."

The group has upgraded its quality management system and won recognition from many world top 500 enterprises, such as Coca-Cola.

In keeping with its "people-centered" principles, the group has employed a large number of senior professionals and experts from home and abroad.

Highlighting technological innovation, the group has achieved a number of innovative breakthroughs including plastic anti-counterfeit bottle caps, safe PET packaging boxes, automobile panel stamping mold and 3D packaging boxes. The group's designs won first and second prizes at the 11th China International Exhibition for Fine Mold 2006.

In May 2003, President Hu Jintao inspected the PUSH Group and praised the company for its rapid hi-tech development record.

The group's annual sales revenue is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan by the end of the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-10).

For more information, pls contact:

Company name: Sichuan Yibin PUSH Group Co Ltd

Address: No. 150, Minjiang West Road, Yibin, Sichuan Province

Post code: 644007

Telephone: 86-831-3565870/3565877/3565689

Fax: 86-831-3555898

Website: www.pushi.com.cn

(China Daily 10/23/2007 page18)