Hanil Tube’s Successful Joint Venture with EUREKA Creates Larger Business Opportunities

[INQ. NO. 1405M44] EUREKA, the joint R&D program between Korean companies and European advanced companies, is creating great results from a sustainable perceptive. Hanil Tube Corp., among major success cases, also underscores the practical effectiveness of the program with specific and visual outcomes in its technological growth along with accompanying notable growth in its overall business.

The following success story illustrates how Hanil Tube Corp. could overcome the management crisis in terms of technological leadership in the global market despite its 45 years of experience in design, development and manufacturing of automotive tubes, and timely meet EUREKA project and eventually grow into a company that exerts bigger market leadership both at home and in the foreign market as well.

Long history of automotive tube manufacture specialist “Hanil Tube” Ever since its establishment in 1969, Hanil Tube has focused on producing automotive brake tubes, fuel tubes, and powertrain tubes and contributed to the development of the Korean automotive industry.

“Our strategic focus on limited areas of automotive tubes led not only to our dominant position in the Korean market, but to the steady development of the Korean automotive industry as well. This actually has caused sluggish growth in sales but eventually led to qualitative growth of our company as an untouchable specialist developer of the targeted areas,” noted Kwon Don-hee, CEO of Hanil Tube. While keeping consistent investment practice to hold technological superiority of design, development, and manufacture related to automotive tubes since our founding, we also devoted our unremitting huge efforts to human resource development. Many of the specialized engineers from our unique training course exert their strong expertise in automotive parts industry circles.

Under the unique motto of “FBI (First, Best, Innovate),” Hanil Tube has operated its own research institute over 10 years and successfully made the world’s first drive in developing hydrogen piping lines, quick connectors, and gasoline direct injection high pressure rails, high pressure pipes, and high pressure quick connector for fuel cell vehicles, and plastic cooling tubes & connectors, plastic powertrain line for electric cars, not a modest achievement among small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Crisis and fateful encounter with EUREKA
However, globalization across all industry has also swept the automotive industry. That meant the existing products in mass-production faced a new crisis: Fuel tubes were under over 10 years of mass-production; powertrain tubes, which were produced under the three traditional processes of steel tubing, welding, and plating, faced increasingly deteriorated price competitiveness over low labor cost countries including China. Powertrain tubes, on the other hand, considered as a fading industry items and remained difficult products to export with their internal corrosiveness and excessive packing costs. To make matters worse, many European enterprises knocked the Korean market with their advanced products applying lightweight plastic tube technologies.

Such simultaneous crises caused Hanil Tube to seek better technology and product that could safeguard its own presence in the local market and access potential foreign markets. After intensive technological agony, Hanil Tube determined to develop low-priced, high temperature-resistant (over 130C.), and light-weight plastic tubes.

Soon after it reached a conclusion to desperately develop such kinds of newer plastic tubes, Hanil Tube made its fateful encounter with EUREKA by aggressively pursuing its strong desire to conduct a joint research development business with European businesses.

For successful EUREKA business, Hanil Tube made a suggestion to two European companies France Arkema, a high-tech company of the high-temperature plastic material technology and Germany’s FRA..NKISCHE, a specialized company of the corrugated tubes and received positive responses from the two companies for EUREKA business and then started joint development business in earnest to develop the world’s first high-temperature plastic light-weight tubes for clean diesel-fueled automotives.

Headed by Hanil Tube, the timely and dramatically established EUREKA project among those three companies was systematically carried out by exchanging of technologies in each specialized section through over four times of regular meetings per year in Korea. Arkema was in charge of developing hightemperature plastic material and providing test data depending on applied fluids. FRA..NKISCHE took on the role of the design of corrugated tube’s form and thickness and supplying of a prototype. And Korean partner Hanil Tube took the responsibility of manufacturing and testing of prototypes through product design. Until now, the three companies have been conducting an introduction event of jointly developed technologies to some targeted auto makers over five times on a yearly basis.

Noticeable outcomes of EUREKA
Hanil Tube has could successfully been reaped some impressive development results through EUREKA. The notable outcomes include development of high-temperature plastic tube for diesel vehicle powertrain, development of high-temperature powertrain plastic tube resin, development of mold and extrusion technology, development of plastic corrugated tubes and quick connectors, and development of ultra high-temperature plastic tube design and test technology.

Hanil Tube was the nation’s first to apply the jointly developed technologies and products to automotive engine tube line realizing decreased manufacturing cost and weight, comprising 10~30% and 40~50%, respectively. Those mean Hanil Tube could save manufacturing cost and automakers and final client drivers could also enjoy lowered maintenance cost as well.

As a most notable movement through EUREKA, Hanil Tube has already delivered KRW 400 million worth of its latest plastic tubes to Ssangyong Motor(TOC Poject) in 2013. And this year, Hanil Tube will also likely to supply its products to Hyundai Motor (High Temperature Line Project). After 2015, through the two cooperative projects, KRW 8 billion and 15 billion are respectively expected.

In conclusion, Hanil Tube through EUREKA could have obtained the accumulated information, technology, and trend from European advanced partner companies through official channels. Also, Hanil Tube could gain an invaluable opportunity to win know-how concerning materials, processing methods through exchanging of each study data, which enabled participating engineers to accumulate useful technology. Through this, EUREKA partially ongoing, Hanil Tube was determined to preemptively develop applied and processing technology to ultimately develop the world’s new technologies and products.

As a global market-oriented company, Hanil Tube has early sought methods to broaden its global market presence through establishing overseas ventures commencing in 2005

 
 
 
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