China’s fastener firms, ‘the rice of industry’, grapple with the nuts and bolts of a slowing economy

Handan city produces more than half of the nuts, bolts and screws used in China’s construction and manufacturing industry

Fastener manufacturers are seeking to expand foreign sales to make up for weaker domestic demand as China’s economic growth has hit record lows

5-MIN READ5-MIN

Classified broadly as fasteners, nuts, bolts and screws are easy to overlook but ubiquitous in industrial activity, from assembling a table or chair to building a skyscraper or a cross-sea bridge. Illustration: Henry Wong

Published: 6:00am, 24 Dec 2019Updated: 1:03pm, 30 Dec 2019

Finding similarities between sunglasses and military fighter jets would seem to be an impossible task, but the two products have at least one thing in common – neither of them can be made without nuts, bolts and screws.

Classified broadly as fasteners, these basic components are easy to overlook but ubiquitous in industrial activity, from assembling a table or chair to building a skyscraper or a cross-sea bridge.

In China, they are known colloquially as “the rice of industry”, an analogy with the grain that is indispensable to the nation’s diet.

And if that is the case, the Yongnian district of Handan city, in central Hebei province, is the most important industrial granary of China. The town, some 450km south of Beijing, produces and sells more than half of the fasteners used in Chinese industry and construction each year.

Yongnian district in Handan city is China’s industrial hub for the production of fasteners. Photo: Orange Wang

Demand for the pieces of hardware in Yongnian mirrors the appetite of downstream industries, echoing changes to economic sentiment in China and many other countries around the world.

“Overall, our order volume has shrunk to some extent this year compared with 2018,” said Zhao Yubo, chairman of the Hebei Fastener Industry Association and the general manager of Feida Standard Factory in Yongnian.

While demand for fasteners from construction firms has been stable, machinery makers have placed fewer orders, Zhao said.

Chinese manufacturing activity has been depressed for most of this year, with industrial production growth falling in October to its second lowest level in more than 17 years. Although manufacturing sentiment rebounded in November for the first time in six months, it is too early to say if the sector has bottomed out, given profits at Chinese manufacturers dropped by 4.9 per cent between January and October from a year earlier, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.