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ABB Wins With 'Go West' Activity
ABB Group, one of the world's top-500 enterprises, is not only a contributor, but also a beneficiary of the China's western development initiative.
Rolf Schaumann, president of ABB China Ltd, aired the view during an interview last week in Chongqing, the country's only centrally administered municipality in the west.
His company joined the Chongqing Transformer Plant and the Three Gorges Project Development Corp in establishing the ABB Chongqing Co Ltd to produce power transformers with advanced designs in 1998 with a total investment of US$73 million.
"As ABB's largest joint venture in China, the company's main purpose is to provide Three Gorges Project and other hydropowered developments in the southwest with efficient, reliable and energy saving power transformers," Schaumann said.
ABB Chongqing Co Ltd, the first joint venture approved by the central government to produce power transformers with a capacity of up to 500 kilowatts, is expected to provide 13 sets of 500-kilowatt transformers for the hydropower projects in Southwest China this year.
ABB Chongqing Co Ltd has delivered 27 sets of 220-kilowatt transformers and 62 sets of 110-kilowatt transformers to hydopower construction projects in the western provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Shanxi, Shaanxi and to the Ningxia Hui and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous regions.
The great market potential in the western regions means a promising future for ABB. However, Schaumann admitted that the company expects competition from some of the four other power transformer producers in China, which are located in Xi'an, Shenyang, Baoding and Changzhou.
"Actually, competition is a good thing, which will encourage manufacturers to continuously upgrade and improve their products, thus benefiting the end-users and improving the industry's development," he said.
He expressed confidence in ABB Chongqing's high technological added-value products, reliable quality and convenient product service.
According an ABB Chongqing source, thanks to the technological support from the Ludvika Technical Center of ABB Sweden, its new 500-kilowatt power transformers easily won an ISO 9001 Certificate for quality and is applying for an ISO 14001 Certificate, which concerns environmental issues.
"ABB is very keen to share technical knowledge. We have successfully transferred the technological information required to produce 500-kilowatt transformers to ABB Chongqing, and we did this two years ahead of schedule," Schaumann said.
The company's design system is directly linked into ABB Ludvika and uses advanced Electrical and Mechanical Design systems with PRO/E design software and UNIX operating systems to make transformer electrical calculations and three-dimension mechanical designs, which guarantees the latest technological information may be obtained by ABB Chongqing.
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