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In September this year, the Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology announced the sixth batch of national-level specialized, refined, innovative and “little giant” enterprises. Nanjing Jiangning District added 29 new enterprises, bringing the total to 113, becoming the first administrative district and county in the province to exceed 100.
Specialized and innovative “little giant” enterprises have long focused on niche markets, have strong innovation capabilities, and master key core technologies. They have gradually become the vanguard of economic transformation and upgrading and the main force of innovation-driven development.
The rapid growth of the “little giant” is a microcosm of Jiangning District’s efforts to forge a “hard-core” industrial chain and supply chain. The district has made targeted efforts in cultivating specialized, refined, and innovative enterprises, with 400 provincial-level specialized, refined, and innovative small and medium-sized enterprises, accounting for more than a quarter of the total number in Nanjing .
Leave your comfort zone and dare to sit on the bench
From its establishment in 2020 to becoming a national technology company this year, it took only four years for the young China Electronics Pengcheng Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. However, the relevant technical team began to accumulate 27 years ago.
In 1997, a Shenzhen subsidiary of China Electronics Corporation established an automation division, investing nearly 30 million yuan annually to develop hard disk heads the size of half a finger. In 2015, in response to the national intelligent manufacturing strategy, China Electronics Corporation launched the “Manufacturing Capacity Enhancement Project” and established China Electronics Pengcheng by the technical team of the former Shenzhen Technology Company.
With the halo of being a third-level subsidiary of a central enterprise, China Electronics Pengcheng chose a new and unfamiliar track – chip defect detection. Due to the high technical threshold, this field has long been controlled by European and American companies, and domestic companies rarely “peek in”. This means that the team has to start from scratch.
The company has a registered capital of 100 million yuan. According to the mixed ownership reform plan of “employees and management holding 15% of the shares”, it can make a profit of more than 10 million yuan in the first year. “But in the first two years, we decided not to distribute dividends for the time being, but to continue to use them for research and development, and no one complained.” said Zhang Zhiyong, vice chairman of China Electric Pengcheng.
After two years of “only receiving salary” in the start-up period, the team launched the first chip defect detection machine in 2022 and passed the national high-tech enterprise certification that year. “In fact, if we just change direction and return to the ‘comfort zone’, we can launch other equipment that can be mass-produced and make quick money, but we still choose to sit on the ‘bench’.” Zhang Zhiyong said frankly.
In contrast, it took Frontier Biopharma, which was founded in 2002, 16 years before China’s first original anti-AIDS drug, Aconin®, was approved for marketing.
This is the world’s first long-acting anti-HIV fusion inhibitor, and is listed as a Class 1.1 new drug in China. Although the company’s factory has long been equipped with a large reactor that is more than one person tall and has a capacity of more than 1,000 liters, Deputy General Manager Zhu Yuting still insists on keeping the palm-sized syringes from more than ten years ago in the exhibition hall, which have been oxidized and yellowed. “We have carried out more than 150 scientific studies. This is the difficulty of making original new drugs.”
Tianbo Software also chose to “ask for trouble” and anchored CAE, the “crown jewel” in the field of industrial software. “It needs to cross multiple disciplines such as mathematics, physics, mechanics and computer science. In addition, this development process is long-term and requires multiple iterations and upgrades to achieve the ideal state. The mentality of quick success and instant benefits is not suitable for this field.” Xie Jiawen, director of the company’s R&D department, said bluntly.
Domestic software only has a 5% market share, and domestic customers are unwilling to take the risk of switching to foreign software even if they pay a high price. In 2011, Tianbo Software was established in such a market environment.
I have what others do not have, and I concentrate on cultivating my inner strength
Devoting oneself to cultivating “internal strength” and forging “unique skills” are the common points that specialized and innovative enterprises have in common.
Before the first high-precision intelligent PCBA visual inspection machine was launched, China Electronics Pengcheng sent a three-person team to the customer’s factory to test the prototype. After months of testing and improvement, the board loaded with hundreds of silicon carbide chips can “rush” through the inspection equipment in turn at an acceleration of 20G and automatically stop. The micron-level positioning technology instantly locks in appearance, size, performance and other defects, with a precision equivalent to one thousandth of a hair.
With this technological advantage, the product passed the provincial scientific and technological achievement evaluation in May last year, and the expert group unanimously agreed that it was “the first domestic set of PCBA final inspection, and the overall technology is at the international advanced level.” “Sometimes we have to thank the West, because they blocked the road, and we went on our own. The Chinese are smart and hardworking, and we are not afraid of that.” Zhang Zhiyong said.
Zhu Yuting agrees with this. In the last five years before Aconin® was launched, in order to find the most diverse patient populations for clinical trials, the team traveled across 6 provinces and 13 cities in China, covering 460,000 kilometers. Especially during the clinical phase III, the team took the initiative to increase the number of hospitals with clinical research qualifications from 12 to 19.
As HIV becomes more and more “intelligent”, the global “cocktail therapy” is increasingly powerless against infected immune cells that can replicate new viruses. Aiconin is targeting this global problem, directly intervening in the first stage of viral infection by inhibiting the fusion of viral membranes with human cell membranes.
“Leading enterprises have diversified business lines. As long as they slightly expand into a new track, they can quickly defeat a small enterprise. So we must cultivate our core competitiveness and achieve ‘what others do not have, we have’ in the subdivided fields.” Zhu Yuting said.
At present, Aconin® has developed two ways of administration: intravenous infusion and intravenous push, breaking the market status of traditional oral administration. In addition, it is administered once a week and has a long half-life of 11 to 12 days in the human body, which is much longer than the 2-3 hours of general peptide drugs. At the same time, the company is also exploring its application in long-term antiviral solutions administered once every four weeks.
