ALONG with Team China, 35,000 high-performance ping pong balls and a wide array of high-tech sports gear descended on the Paris Olympics. Chinese experts and industry players said the situation reflected a profound change in the Chinese industrial sector in the past decade.
From chip-embedded soccer balls that allow a referee a firmer grasp of match dynamics to a nano-coated judo mattress that resists stains and is easier to clean, the infusion of tech ingredients is the latest case of Chinese companies’ growing manufacturing prowess, in addition to cost performance, flexibility and first-rate services, observers said.
“Our company’s illuminated table tennis table is a product of constant improvement and innovation for over two decades. The three-dimensional logo utilizes advanced tooling techniques to achieve the desired balance between looks and user-friendliness,” Lou Shihe, general manager of Shanghai-based DHS, told the Global Times on Monday. DHS is a longtime provider of sports gear to the Olympics.
Yang Xuefeng, brand operations manager at Guangdong-based Double Fish Sports Goods Group Co., told the Global Times on Monday that his company provided 35,000 table tennis balls of “top quality” to the Paris Olympic Games.
“The ping pong balls have an elasticity tolerance under 4 millimeters, a weight tolerance of 0.015 grams, and hardness tolerance of 0.03 millimeters, surpassing International Table Tennis Federation standards. The stringent quality ensures more stable flight, precise landing and better feel,” Yang said.
For the first time in the history of the Olympics, the company has innovatively incorporated ball-serving machine technology into the referee table, replacing manual labor with a machine that can precisely send the ball from the table’s server to a spot in front of the player, Yang said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told a routine press conference on Friday that “made in China” is one of the ways that China participates in the Olympics.
High-quality Chinese products will provide technical and service support for the Paris Olympics and make the event even more stunning visually and technologically, Mao said.
Chinese sports gear was already predominant in many major sports events before the Paris Olympic Games, but it is the Olympics that command the media spotlight and attention of the masses.
“Just as the 1988 Seoul Olympics demonstrated to the world of the capability of Corporate Japan in factory assembly production, I think the Paris Olympics showed the leading position of Corporate China in the era of smart and intelligent manufacturing,” Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University, told the Global Times on Monday.
The realization of complex processing techniques requires best-in-class machine tools, as well as constant and hefty investment in a plant’s production line. Sports gear production has become a miniature model of Chinese manufacturing’s transformation from large-scale assembly line production to module-based intelligent production featuring high-level automation and informatization, Cao said.
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