Chemistry graduates break foreign monopoly
Print Edition
Titan Technology, a Songjiang-based company founded by a group of chemists from East China University of Science and Technology, has broken the monopoly of foreign manufacturers in supply of laboratory equipment and reagents.
The company, founded in 2007, is the brainchild of a group of students living together in a dormitory. Chief executive and co-founder Xie Yingbo was recently appointed as an official mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs under a Shanghai municipal government program to encourage innovation.
鈥淲e promise to help and guide postgraduate students in chemistry, materials and biology to set up their own companies,鈥 Xie said.
Titan now has sales networks across the mainland and Hong Kong, Europe and North America. It has some 200 employees, many of them young postgraduates.
Before Titan鈥檚 establishment, over 90 percent of lab equipment and experiment reagents for China鈥檚 universities and research institutes were imported at prices nearly threefold above what Titan charges, according to Xie.
Titan鈥檚 clients now include multinational companies, like Fisher, 3M and Honeywell, he added.
Xie, Titan Deputy Manager Zhou Xiaowei and four other co-founders of the company were sharing a four-bed dormitory room in 2006 to save money.
鈥淲e liked playing computer games in the dormitory together looked upon ourselves as the heroes we played in the games,鈥 Xie said.
After graduation, Zhou was offered a high-salary job with pharmaceutical giant Novartis, but chose instead to join Xie in starting their own company.
鈥淗e told me no matter what we do, if we do it together we can succeed,鈥 Zhou said. 鈥淚f we planted vegetables, we could be the best farmers in China!鈥
Zhou said he was inspired by Xie鈥檚 confidence.
They developed their first lab equipment in 2007, but it was hard to woo buyers from the imports they traditionally bought. That began to change after Xie managed to persuade his doctoral advisor to buy the some of the group鈥檚 products.
Now, Titan is producing more than 30,000 tons of high-end reagents, compared with only 1,000 tons at the start.
Zhou said the company鈥檚 reputation was enhanced after the group succeeded in extracting from rare algae a toxin that can be used to detect toxic material in seafood. The toxin was formerly available only from a Singapore company.
Zhou and the other co-founders managed to refine the toxin to a purification level of 99.9 percent. They are selling it at a price 30 percent cheaper than its former monopoly price.
Titan has invested over 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) to build a research laboratory. As a next step, Xie said a fund will be set up to support young entrepreneurs.
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