The Linglong Tire Factory in Serbia is the first European tire project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Mr. Vučić, president of Serbia and Mr. Chen Bo, Chinese Ambassador to Serbia honored the groundbreaking of the project with their presence. Safe-Run competed with excellent suppliers, including well-known enterprises from Finland, South Korea, and Japan on the international arena. By going through the evaluation of the expert team of Linglong Tire, Safe-Run finally won the strenuous international bidding, and obtained the bulk order of intelligent logistics which is highly technology-sophisticated project of the Linglong Tire Serbia project at value of more than 700 million yuan.

Fig.: Safe-Run Booth, 19th China International Rubber Technology Exhibition.

Build European Green and Smart Factory Service for Linglong Tire

Under the impact of the market environment, China's rubber machinery enterprises are not placing large orders of tire equipment, and the situation will be even more frustrating in the second half and next year. It is not easy for Safe-Run to achieve the results under such background. Safe-Run has always been an important partner of Linglong, providing intelligent automated production lines and PCR Uni-stage Tire Building Machine for the factory of the latter in Zhaoyuan, Shandong Province, which is the location of its Headquarters, as well as factories in Liuzhou, Guangxi Province, Jingmen, Hubei Province, and Thailand. The total number of projects currently serving Linglong Tire is nearly 1.5 billion yuan.

The first Chinese tire factory in Europe - the Zrenjanin project of Serbia had its launching ceremony on March 29 of this year. Mr. Vučić, president of Serbia, Chinese Ambassador to Serbia, and leaders of industry associations such as China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation and China Rubber Industry Association honored the event with their presence. The factory is currently the largest foreign direct investment project in Serbia, with planned area of 130 hectares and total floor area of nearly 400,000 square meters, which will provide  capacity of 13.62 million high-performance radial tires of various types after completion. The project will leverage artificial intelligence, mobile sensing, industrial big data and industrial robotics to integrate lean management, excellent quality, green manufacturing and high-end brand all in one, and offer an all-round intelligent, automated and green tire factory, to set the benchmark for high-end intelligent manufacturing and green supply chain systems.

Fig.: groundbreaking ceremony of Linglong Tire Serbia project

Safe-Run has won a huge order of smart logistics projects with extremely high technological sophistication of the Europe Project of Linglong Tire at the value of more than RMB 700 million. We are determined to build it into the state-of-art intelligent logistics production line.

With A Record of 3.5 Billion RMB Order In Hand, Safe-Run Enters Into A New Era

In recent years, Safe-Run has responded to the national Belt and Road Initiative and proactively by serving “Belt and Road” projects. In addition to the Linglong tire project in Europe, Safe-Run is also proactively involved in Roadbot Tire Project in Abu Dhabi.

It is reported that in July 2018, during President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the UAE, Roadbot, JOCIC and the UAE government signed a tripartite admission agreement to turn the Roadbot Abu Dhabi tire project into the No.1 Investment Project of the China-Arab Capacity Cooperation Demonstration Park, which has received close attention and strong support from the governments of the two countries. On July 22, 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with His Excellency Mr. Muhammad, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi in Great Hall of The People. President Xi emphasized that China and UAE should strengthen their cooperation on development strategies to facilitate the second phase of Container Terminal of Khalifa Port and the China-Arab Capacity Cooperation Demonstration Park. Roadbot tire project is highly recognized by the two governments as the demonstration project of the China-Arab Capacity Cooperation Demonstration Park.

On December 10, 2018, Mr. Ning Ji Zhe, the Deputy Director of the National Development and Reform Commission attended the groundbreaking and announced the commencement of the Roadbot Abu Dhabi tire project. On January 22, 2019, at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Roadbot Abu Dhabi tire project, Mr. Sultan, the Minister of State of UAE and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Port personally laid the foundation for the project, marking the rise of the first tire factory in the UAE.

Fig.: design sketch of Roadbot Abu Dhabi tire project

Safe-Run is responsible for providing key equipment of the first phase of the project. Together with internationally renowned companies such as Siemens and AB, it will build a world-class smart tire factory for Roadbot. With industrial internet of things, logistics automation, equipment intelligence, connected devices and real-time collection and intelligent analysis of system data, the automotive and intelligent management are achieved in the overall process of raw material inventory, mixing, molding, curing, inspection, and final product releasing. At the same time, Safe-Run provides Roadbot with high-end smart building machine and energy-saving and environmental friendly curing press.

Although the current tire market is not promising, Safe-Run, as a supplier of top tire makers such as Linglong, Giti, Nexen Tire and Roadbot, etc., has already hold orders of more than 3.5 billion RMB. The record height initiate a new era of glory of Safe-Run.

In the next 3 to 5 years, Safe-Run will ride the wave of industrial and market double restructure to further extend product portfolio from only PCR building machine to a whole family of high-end PCR automatic building machine, TBR automatic four-drum building machine, TBR and PCR hydraulic curing press; conduct strategic cooperation with SK Group of South Korea to exploit late-mover advantage in business segments such as smart logistics and intelligent production line, and develop the competitive industry- smart logistics while its high-end PCR building machine is taking the lead in China; shift from domestic market oriented approach to a parallel development of both domestic and foreign markets, and especially participate in the development of the One Belt One Road market to turn the passive sales market to a creative and innovative market and boost market vitality. It is estimated that Safe-Run's market sales and profit growth rate will reach 30-40% on average in the next 3 to 5 years, and turnover will exceed RMB 1.7 billion by 2020.

Continuous Innovation, Unceasing Product Development

The good performance of Safe-Run is attribute to its strong technical strength.

Fig.: Safe-Run research and development center in Kunshan

In order to provide customers with smarter and more efficient high-end intelligent logistics equipment, and improve the future competitiveness of the company, Safe-Run decided to invest 550 million RMB to expand the new research center which started in October. Logistics equipment including ultra-high-speed piler (300m/min), ultra-high-speed rail-changing RGV (300m/min), ultra-high-speed RGV (260m/min), high-speed high-precision gantry robot (X-axis: 3.5 m/sec, Y: 3.5m/sec, Z: 2.5m/sec), etc. will be introduced, analyzed and researched. These core equipment will fill the gap of core ultra-high-speed intelligent logistics equipment in local market.

Safe-Run is integrating its superior resources, increasing R&D investment, and actively exploring intelligent logistics equipment and systems for semiconductor, petrochemical and pharmaceutical industry.

Meanwhile, Safe-Run heavily invests in R&D on building machines and curing press, and never stops with technological innovation. It has made major breakthroughs in PCR and TBR tire building machine technology recently.

In recent years, Safe-Run has never stopped with technological innovation, and made breakthroughs in PCR and TBR tire building machines.

Safe-Run building machine continues to innovate on the foundation of its ten years’ expertise and has achieved following results: 1. Building machine smart control system SCADA (jointly developed with Siemens); 2. Industrial leading green design standard of building machine (full life cycle); 3. Maximizing capacity: double station reloading, automatic specification switching, sequential digital twin simulation; 4. Implementation of smart technology: RFID, MES, robotics, virtual remote assistance; 5. Modularized design; 6. Tire quality control: 3D visual inspection, high precision linear motor positioning ±0.01mm, self-learning technology and zero tension conduction.

Based on above technologies, Safe-Run filled the gap of local market and successfully developed three type of equipment: PCR uni-stage tire building machine SR-PUDe, TBR four-drum uni-stage building machine SR-TUC1 and passenger vehicle and light truck building machine SR-TPU1.

By the end that Safe-Run is dedicated to build itself into a company which the country will take pride in, by introducing high standard, strength and fast pace as management philosophy and regarding Safety First, Quality-oriented, Innovation, green and intelligence as management target. It will always pursuit the mission of providing customer with better products and service.