Intercable China

In the Middle Kingdom

Looking at the development of China, it seems that everything is possible in this country. In a very short time China was catapulted into modern times. Where even before

Decades of simple villages shaped the landscape, today world metropolises grow into the sky, connected by modern high-speed trains and well-developed motorway networks. China possesses over 70% of the occurrences of rare earths, is rich in oil and coal, grows on average 6.5% per year, is the largest economy on our planet behind the USA and has the largest gold and foreign exchange reserves. Whole branches of industry have probably migrated to China forever, while others are in the process of establishing themselves in this rapidly growing country and conquering the world from here. Also in science, 20% of the relevant publications come from China, companies like Apple do not only produce in China, a large part of the SW development is now done locally. For thousands of years, China has considered itself the "Middle Kingdom", and even today, literally nothing works without China. Wherever there is light and shadow, the environment in China has suffered enormously in this time of rapid progress. This has now been recognised, steelworks and thousands of coal-fired power stations have been closed down for good. With ambitious goals, a trend reversal is now being initiated here as well to set an example. In 2030, for example, 25% of energy consumption must be covered by renewable energy.

China is already the heavyweight in the automotive industry, 30% of the world production is now located in China. Partly because of the need to get the environmental problems under control, especially in the conurbations, and partly because it has been recognised that know-how in the field of thermal combustion engines will never catch up with Europe, the ambitious goal has been set of converting 12% of total production to electric vehicles by 2020, which is equivalent to about 4-5 million vehicles per year. Compared to the 330,000 vehicles sold in 2016, this is a rapid increase.

All this explains why China plays such an important role for Intercable. Sooner or later, China will be by far the biggest market for the Intercable technology.

In the middle of 2016 Intercable founded a joint venture with Fengmei, a well-known Chinese company of the automotive supplier industry, with the aim to supply the Chinese market with our products from China. Our subsidiary "Ningbo Intercable Fengmei New Energy Automotive Technology Co Ltd", short NIF, is our first production site in Asia.

Intercable supplies the know-how and the technology for the electric vehicles, also the support of the customers in China is under the responsibility of Intercable and reports about the sales directly to Bruneck.

In 2017 the location in Ningbo, a city with 6.5 million inhabitants in the south of Shanghai, was opened. Since almost one year the preparations for the start of production are in full swing. Supported by our Bruneck employees from the process technology, quality and production departments, the first customer audits and the first 

production start in June will be successfully completed. Six further SOPs will follow in the next 12 months, and sales will already exceed €20 million in 2020.

This rapid growth is due to the great commitment of our employees. The Intercable Team has proven that international cooperation is possible even for a medium-sized company despite language and cultural barriers. In the next few years the course for success in e-mobility will be set in China. The technologies will be developed and the supply chains defined and it will become clear who will play an important role in this new, technologically demanding and highly dynamic market.

For Intercable it is therefore not a question of being part of it, but a question of positioning and the role we want to play in the market of e-mobility worldwide. Mirrored by the development, which our company has shown in its short but extremely successful history, we can all look forward to many more challenges and an exciting time.