Background
Zheng Shengtao was born in 1952 to a poor family of ten, Zheng began to shoulder the household burden at age 16.
胜涛 郑
Zheng Shengtao was born in 1952 to a poor family of ten, Zheng began to shoulder the household burden at age 16.
Zheng graduated from Zhejiang University, where he also earned his masters degree.
He went to the countryside, hauled a wooden wheelbarrow and rushed to sell goods in local markets, enduring hardship of all sorts. In the 1960s and 1970s, he practiced weightlifting. While suffering from hunger, he amazingly broke a record in Wenzhou City, which became a highlight of his life.
In 1981, Zheng became vice president of a state-owned electric machine factory on the verge of collapse, and managed to successfully turn the business around in a short time. In the following year, he launched his own business by renting several houses and equipment from a factory facing bankruptcy. With those assets, he started to manufacture punching and shearing machines and square chests. Then he invested the profit, RMB3000, from the small machinery operation to lease additional equipment and expand his business.
In 1984, shortly after he founded the Wenzhou Lucheng Printing Machine Factory, Zheng discovered a potential market while attending some trade fairs. He decided to change his business focus by producing splitting machines. At that time the market was dominated by expensive imports. Zheng and his staff worked day and night and finally made key breakthroughs in research and development. Soon, experts and clients acknowledged that the quality of his products was the equal of imported products. At only one fifth of the cost of the imported equivalents, the sale of Shenli splitting machines rose dramatically as a result.
However, Zheng did not stop after his first success. He continued to develop other high-tech products, such as intaglio security-printing machines that went to the global market and brought his company great revenue. In 1994, he founded Wenzhou Shenli Corporation Ltd, and six years later the company was reorganized into the China Shenli Group. After consulting many renowned experts and scholars both home and abroad, Zheng formulated his new corporate strategy as ‘maintaining the core business and developing two wings.’ Maintaining the core business means continuing to strengthen printing machine manufacturing, which now has 148 different manufacturing lines for whole-set machinery products; developing two wings signifies expanding into the real estate market and developing high-tech and environmentally-friendly products.